EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER

Volume 8 Number 3 - Winter 1974

SIR RALPH BROMPTON - AN IDENTIFICATION

Donald Greene (University of Southern California)

The real-life inspiration for many of the characters in Waugh's World War II trilogy is not hard to detect. Sometimes Waugh gives them names and habits which make the identification transparent; sometimes they can be identified from our knowledge of Waugh's biography and prejudices. "Old Ruby," who lives in the Dorchester Hotel and gives dinner parties in honor of celebrities like Sir James Barrie (who, to her annoyance, fails to appear, having been dead for many years), is surely the famous society hostess, Emerald, Lady Cunard, also a denizen of the Dorchester during the war. Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon, figures as Everard Spruce, editor of the avant-garde Survival, in the pages of which he publishes the writings of a survival from Waugh's earlier works - the poet Parsnip, who, in Put Out More Flags, has fled to America at the beginning of the war, along with his alliterative collaborator, Pimpernell (Auden and Isherwood, of course). Parsnip's future fate is disclosed in Love Among the Ruins, both in the text and in a drawing by Waugh, where he is shown as an unhappy, desiccated old figure, waiting patiently for admission at the entrance to the voluntary euthanasia chamber kindly provided by the authorities of the British Utopia. Auden's sympathetic treatment of Waugh in his New Yorker review of A Little Learning is a remarkable feat of Christian forgiveness, if that is what it was. The ubiquitous Mrs. Stitch, also a survival from earlier Waugh, who takes charge of Guy Crouchback on his return from Crete to Alexandria, where her husband is an important emissary of the British government, has long been identified with Lady Diana Cooper, whose husband, Duff Cooper (later Viscount Norwich), held such an office at this time. The commando officer, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, leader of Hookforce, is Waugh's commander, Brigadier Laycock, leader of Layforce. The unnamed poetry-quoting Commander-in-Chief, who gives Guy a lift in his official car, is Field Marshal Lord Wavell, compiler of the poetry anthology, Other Men's Flowers. And so on.

In the last volume of the trilogy, Unconditional Surrender (in the U.S., The End of the Battle) a new but important character is introduced, who continually turns up in unexpected places and obviously wields considerable power behind the scenes - the elegant and sinister Sir Ralph Brompton, ex-diplomat, homosexual, leftist in politics, influential in the world of letters. As the holder of a minor government office, he makes it his business to indoctrinate the British Army, especially its younger members, with leftist views, preaching subservience to Russia and intriguing for the ousting of Mihailovitch in Yugoslavia and Chiang-kai-shek in China. Many years before he had become the lover of the young cavalry trooper Ludovic, made him his valet on his diplomatic posts ("secretary" when travelling), educated him, and now, when Ludovic is in his late thirties - Sir Ralph has replaced him with a series of younger men - sponsors Ludovic's budding efforts as an author and recommends to Spruce Ludovic's future best-seller The Death Wish (earlier entitled, significantly, Pensées, and described "as though Logan Pearsall Smith had written Kafka"). Clearly he stands for much that Waugh fears and detests in the brave new world of 1945.

The recent publication by Nigel Nicolson of hitherto undisclosed letters and private papers of his parents, the late Sir Harold Nicolson and Lady Nicolson (V. Sackville-West) (Portrait of a Marriage, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), seems to confirm a surmise I made long ago about Sir Ralph's original. Sir Harold, like Sir Ralph, began his career in the diplomatic service. His industrious and varied (but hardly dazzling) career as a man of letters is well known. The three volumes of excerpts from his diaries, also edited by his son, reveal his wide acquaintance in London political and literary circles during the war. Like Sir Ralph, Sir Harold appears in them as a considerable snob - he intrigued assiduously for a peerage, but had to make do in the end with a minor knighthood (K.C.V.O.). His snobbishness, however, did not prevent him from choosing the left rather than the right in politics as the road to advancement. and between 1935 and 1945 was a "National Labour" Member of Parliament. Defeated in the general election of 1945, he ran again in 1948, this time as a straight Labour, or Socialist, candidate. He was again defeated, and an article which he published soon afterward, expressing his distaste for having had to canvass among the unwashed masses, finished his prospects in Labour politics and cost him the peerage he thought his efforts had earned.

Like Sir Ralph, Sir Harold lived most of the time in a London flat, rather than at Sissinghurst Castle with his wife. From this latest memoir emerges the last detail needed to establish the identification - like Sir Ralph, Sir Harold also entertained promising (and good-looking) young male writers there. Mr. Nicolson frankly discloses that both his parents were practicing homosexuals.

My own suspicions were awakened by a passage (pp. 159-60 of the Little Brown edition, 1961) describing the career of Guy's uncle Peregrine, "a notorious bore," a fatuous and feckless but good-hearted individual:

Uncle Peregrine … was obliged to spend the rest of the [first world] war as A.D.C. to a colonial governor who repeatedly but vainly cabled for his recall. In the 1920s he had hung about the diplomatic service as honorary attaché. Once Ralph Brompton, as first secretary, had been posted to the same embassy, and had sought to make him the chancery butt; unsuccessfully; his apathetic self-esteem was impervious to ridicule, no spark could be struck from that inert element.

This is a precise summary of what is recounted in Chapter VI, "Titty," of Harold Nicolson's Some People (1927), a series of thinly disguised autobiographical vignettes. It is about a similarly fatuous young diplomat, whom his brighter colleagues similarly try to make the chancery butt. Nicolson narrates in appreciative detail one particular trick they used to play on him - to compress a strong spring binder in a dispatch box, place boxes of paper clips or a tin of tooth powder on it; and enjoy the result when the unsuspecting "Titty" opened the box. To their disappointment, however, he never becomes angry; Waugh's "his apathetic self-esteem was impervious to ridicule" exactly describes it. The whole chapter is a cruel and memorable piece of writing (Some People is by far the best thing Nicolson ever wrote) and no doubt stuck in Waugh's mind. It is true that it ends with a curious passage of retraction, or expression of shame, by Nicolson; nevertheless the whole tale is told with sadistic relish.

But there must be many more such identifications to be made. The despicable Major "Fido" Hound, the editor of Waugh's diary excerpts in The Observer tells us, was an actual officer in the expedition to Crete, but he continues to disguise his identity under that name. I am particularly curious - perhaps readers of EWN can help: who was Ludovic? Or is it yet safe to say?

VILE BODIES: A REVOLUTION IN FILM ART

Jeffrey M. Heath (University Of Toronto)

Evelyn Waugh's love of the visual arts was militantly idiosyncratic. He once said that architecture ceased about the time he was born and that Picasso was just a joke.(1) Real painting, he claimed, stopped by 1870.(2) As a young man Waugh had wanted to be a painter. By the time he left Oxford in 1924 he was known for his sketches and cartoons in The Isis and The Cherwell. But he left his art-classes in despair to become a student of carpentry, a schoolteacher, a biographer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and finally, a novelist. His library, now housed in a modernistic Texan fortress which Waugh fortunately never saw, contains many volumes on Victorian painting, architecture and formal gardening. Waugh knew about sculpture too. In A Tourist in Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1960) he writes discerningly of the ornate mortuary sculpture at Campo Santa in Genoa, describing himself as "an amateur of cemeteries."

Among such uncompromisingly antique tastes one does not expect to find, but does find, a lifelong interest in the cinema. In A Little Learning (p. 28), Waugh recalls that his "first visual memory [was] of a camera obscura on the pier at Weston-super-Mare." At Lancing Public School he advised a novelist friend to go to the cinema if he wished to improve his style. At Oxford he was film critic for The Isis. In middle age he whiled away the tedium of many a rural afternoon in the darkness of the Dursley picturedrome. Critics have been quick to show that Waugh uses a variety of cinematic techniques in his early work, but I should like to suggest, with particular reference to Vile Bodies that while Waugh's mechanical use of the cinema is interesting, its symbolic and thematic role is even more important.

In 1924, after Waugh went down from Oxford with no degree, he and some friends made a film called The Scarlet Woman. The scenario, some acting and much of the directing were by Waugh.(3) Though this high-spirited account of Rome's "gigantic attempt at the conversion of England" was Waugh's first and last venture in film-making, he did not forget about the cinema. In 1926 he published his first short story, "The Balance."(4) Almost wholly autobiographical, it deals obliquely with Waugh's art-classes and with his infatuation with Olivia Plunket-Greene. It also contains a remarkable account of a sentimental but intoxicated return to Oxford. "The Balance" culminates in the attempted suicide of its hero, Adam Douro. The originals of these events can be found in Waugh's autobiography, A Little Learning. But chief among the attractions of "The Balance" is its "film-within-a-film" structure. Adam's story takes place on film; it is being watched by a cinema audience. As the story opens the film characters are playing "analogies" about one another, and it is clear that Waugh wishes us to see the analogies between our world and their "film-world."

Waugh's next story is "The Tutor's Tale."(5) Here Ernest Vaughan, an ex-Oxonian with no degree, becomes the tutor of George, the allegedly insane son of the repressive Duke and Duchess of Stayle. Ernest tries to straighten George out but it soon becomes apparent that George is quite sane: it is his parents who are mad. The story, which is little more than an anecdote about the inversion of madness and sanity, ends abruptly with the comment that the narrative would have been longer had circumstances permitted.

In the fulness of time "The Tutor's Tale" did become a longer narrative: Vile Bodies. Ernest Vaughan's arrival at Stayle in "The Tutor's Tale" becomes Adam Fenwick-Syme's arrival at Doubting 'All. The wording varies slightly and the style is more mature, but the similarity is unmistakable. One can see little connection between "The Tutor's Tale" and the cinema at first glance. But the plot of the little story consists of a simple inversion (not George but his parents are mad) - and optical inversion is of course the basis of film projection. From "The Tutor's Tale," then, Waugh adopts the theme of the generation-gap and the principle of inversion; from "The Balance" he borrows the "film-within-a-film" technique and the idea of analogy. By merging the principles of his two earlier stories Waugh creates in Vile Bodies the "film-world" of Bright Young People who are not just reversed but wholly inverted: "They say, 'If a thing's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing at all'" (p. 143). If it were not for the rapid rotary motion of the plot, their insubstantial world would lapse at once into a series of disconnected "stills."

Part of the fun in reading Vile Bodies lies in watching Waugh incorporate the resources of the cinema into his fictional technique. Juxtapositions, cuts, close-ups, pan-shots, fast and slow-motion shots - Waugh uses them all. But we do not really understand Vile Bodies until we see that the real force of the cinema is metaphoric. Vile Bodies is organized around Mr. Isaacs' film-life of John Wesley. Waugh draws an analogy, implicit this time, between the film-life of Wesley and the "film-life" of Adam Fenwick-Symes and the Bright Young People. Mr. Isaacs is the director of the film and Waugh is the rather more accomplished director of the other.

In a discussion which anticipates my own,(6) Heinz Kosok shows that Waugh repeatedly directs the reader's attention to the characters' clothing, as if they are all actors. Mr. Kosok might have added that literary allusions also suggest that Adam's world is all a play. Simon Balcairn's declension into death with his head in a gas oven echoes Hamlet's declension into madness. As Adam rides to Aylesbury he sees a man "doing sums, which never seemed to come right … 'Has he given all to his daughter?' thought Adam" (p. 152). At the motor races, the drunk Major tells Adam, "all's well that ends well." And Adam asks him, "When shall we meet again?" (p. 191). High over England in an aeroplane, Ginger Littlejohn is moved to quote "This earth. of majesty, this something or other Eden" from "a blue poetry book" (pp. 222-23). But the view resembles "birth and copulation and death," Sweeney's line from "Fragment of an Agon."

Mr. Kosok also suggests that Mr. Isaacs' film "parallels" the novel at large. He is right of course, but the evidence he adduces is largely incidental. It remains to be shown just how exceptionally and specifically appropriate Mr. Isaacs' film is to the novel as a whole. The clue is Mr. Isaacs' sales-pitch to Adam (pp. 158-159):

Now this film … of which you have just witnessed a mere fragment, marks a stepping stone in the development of the British Film Industry. It is the most important All-Talkie super-religious film to be produced solely in this country by British artists and management and by British capital. It has been directed throughout … and supervised by a staff of expert historians and theologians … This is a British company and I don't want to let any of those foreign speculators in on it …

The Wonderfilm Company and its productions are entirely British. This is because the Wonderfilm Company is Britain and the events in British history are nothing but films. That is, they have been films since the Company was founded, which no doubt took place in Tudor times: "Have a card. That's the name of the company in the corner. Not the one that's scratched out - the one written above" (p. 157). A hand-me-down firm whose first two productions were botched and boycotted, the Wonderfilm Company chronicles the extravaganza which ensued when the Anglican Revolt inverted the course of British history. "A Brand from the Burning," the film life of John Wesley, is only one episode in a continuing story. An earlier film, says Colonel Blount, uncomprehending medium for Waugh's irony, was "quite a revolution in Film Art" (p. 163).

The Wonderfilm Company's "development" is in fact a series of deteriorating reproductions. According to Waugh, England repudiated Catholicism but in fact succeeded only in weakly imitating it. Anglicanism succumbed in turn to lesser imitators. Readers of Decline and Fall will remember that Prendergast, the lapsed Anglican rector, was decapitated by a lunatic Calvinist. In Vile Bodies, Wesley's Methodism constitutes an even feebler duplicate. On a slender budget, Mr. Isaacs' amateurs act out the history of amateurs in religion. Their film is an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. Mrs. Melrose Ape, with her magnetic smile, tweeds and moustache, is modern evangelism - not only inverted but perverted.

One suspects that Mr. Isaacs was active long before he took over the Wonderfilm Company of Great Britain. When Adam shakes hands he feels "what seemed to be a handful of rings under his fingers" (p. 157). A presiding figure over cycles of religious supercession, Mr. Isaacs is the archetypal exploiter of religion. He is an early version of the wandering Jew whom Helena meets in her novel. But the Reformation is not a money-maker and Mr. Isaacs sells out, presumably taking with him the extra "hundred feet or so of galloping horses" which he can fit in "somewhere else" (p. 162). Colonel Blount, enthusiastic actor in his own home movie and emblematic of the Reformation in eclipse, loses his money by purchasing a film about the causes of his own ruin. Hard of hearing, absent-minded, and a stagestruck amateur actor on the verge of bankruptcy, Colonel Blount is transparently Waugh's own father. Waugh's friend Francis Crease had said of Arthur Waugh: "Charming, entirely charming, and acting all the time" [italics mine].(7) Blount tries to sell shares in his film fiasco to Adam, the younger generation, but Adam is penniless, partly due to the fact that Blount has already given him a phoney cheque (for £1,000) signed "Charlie Chaplin". Eventually, Doubting 'All becomes a hospital and the wounded soldiers "adore" the film - another inversion of cause and effect. In A Little Learning (p. 70) Waugh noted that "in 1918 [Arthur Waugh] acted in a short sketch designed to amuse wounded soldiers in hospitals."

It is not surprising that Waugh should regard the latter history of Great Britain as a film. The world had been slipping more out of focus for him with each year, and when his wife betrayed him with a BBC announcer, his disgust was complete. His conversion was really an inversion, both of lifestyles and historical perspectives. The Reformation became the Anglican Revolt; the print became the negative and what once had been solid became theologically insubstantial. This is not to say that Waugh's "Catholic fiction" begins with his conversion in 1930; a close reading of Decline and Fall (London: Chapman and Hall, 1928) will divulge another biting anti-Anglican polemic.

Though a small part of Vile Bodies was written before Evelyn Gardner's affair with John Heygate, it is safe to say that Adam Fenwick-Symes is Waugh himself. Adam's search for stability reflects Waugh's own disenchantment with the shadowy social treadmill - with the notable difference that Waugh escaped. Unblinking as a camera lens, Waugh scrutinizes his own story, which revolves speedily around "those two poles of savagery Lady Circumference and Lady Metroland" (p. 123). These "two poles" correspond not only to the two hubs of the Wonderfilm Company's historical film projector, but also to the Tudor Settlement and the present day. In Waugh's eyes history turned back on itself at the Reformation and became a series of imitative cycles. The first cycle, feeble Anglican imitation, is just over while the second, an instinctual drive toward material perfection, has only begun. Together the two cycles constitute the motor-cycle of history which Father Rothschild must drive. If this sounds fanciful, the reader is invited to reconsider the motif of motorized revolution which is such a constant feature of Waugh's fiction. Horse-power is an important Waugh motif because misguided rationalism began what Waugh regards as a now-mindless proliferation of revolutions in every sphere of human activity. Revolutions, imitation, reflections, shadows, the picturesque - all these stem from the ascendancy of the City of Man over the City of God.

Motion does not always mean progress. As the surface action of Vile Bodies rockets forward, Waugh moves backward in time by hints and allusions to diagnose the origins of Adam's inability to get anywhere. Just as the images on a film are inverted when projected, so Waugh traces the modern dilemma in inverse chronological order back to its sources in revolution. First is Shepheard's Hotel, the "well of Edwardian certainty" (p. 32) fictionally located on the present site of an antique shop. After this comes Doubting 'All, Colonel Blount's decaying Victorian country house. Then comes Anchorage House, Lady Circumference's picturesque city house. Here in the house of the eighteenth century Father Rothschild gently explains the younger generation's dilemma to Mr. Outrage and Lord Metroland, the older generation: "Don't you think … that it is all in some way historical?" (p. 143). Father Rothschild means that the Bright Young People's desire to move toward perfection on material grounds is the modern result of England's misguided rationalism in the sixteenth century. In Waugh's view national wrong choice has prohibited personal right choice, for it has made the present field of enquiry incomplete.

Waugh's purpose in Vile Bodies is to make sure that the reader is in full possession of all his options, even if this involves learning the hard way. Waugh plays on his readers' defective cultural equipment. Vaguely aware that a choice-situation is being set up, most readers allow themselves to be drawn into the "debates" between the older and younger generation, city and country, animalism and humanism, Lady Circumference and Lady Metroland. As soon as Waugh has worried the reader into a premature choice, the roof falls in, condemning both the unhappy reader and the object of his approval. It turns out that the "debates" are red herrings: the real choice is between the entire City of Man (the film-world) and the City of God. In 1948 Waugh wrote, "The last Judgment above the medieval door showed the lost and the saved as fairly equally divided; the path to salvation as exceedingly narrow and beset with booby-traps; the reek of brimstone was everywhere."(8) A Waugh novel is not dissimilar; there are snares everywhere and those who trip are direly punished.

In Labels (1929), written the year before Vile Bodies, Waugh described the twentieth century as an age "of infinitely expanding means of communication and an infinitely receding substance of the communicable" (p. 40). The controlling pun-situation of Waugh's early fiction is of course that words have gained the ascendancy over the Word. Ground in the struggle between The Excess and The Beast, the Word dwindles to mere chatter and the whole world becomes lower-case. If, as Waugh insinuates, Anglican England is a mere duplicate of Catholic England, then the media is engaged in reproducing a shrunken reproduction, just as Mr. Isaacs' film is an imitation of an imitation. Waugh wrote in 1929 that the public had even developed an instinctive preference for the second-rate: "There is more or less of anything: a bottle of champagne or two bottles but no idea that between one bottle and another differences of date and brand should suggest a preference."(9) Much later, in Unconditional Surrender (1961), Guy Crouchback's father contends that "quantitative judgments don't apply" (p. 10). But in Vile Bodies there is only an implicit condemnation of the material attempt to offset spiritual loss.

Wounded by the loss of spiritual values, people "adore" reproductions in Vile Bodies. Currents of phoniness cross and re-cross, luring the reader into a wilderness of mirrors. At Colonel Blount's mock-Gothic mansion a group dressed in eighteenth-century costume sings a hymn in front of the cinema camera while another group shifts "the transept of Exeter Cathedral in sections of canvas and match-boarding" (p. 155). Mr. Isaacs, a phoney film-man, tries to sell out to Adam, a novice news-man. Photographers take pictures of Archie Schwert, who is already "too bogus."

Through the controlling metaphor of the cinema, Waugh implies that this merely derivative and shadowy film-world risks a disastrous short-circuit. Through another motif, that of song or evangel, he implies that the news of Mrs. Ape and the gossip-column alike will eventuate in bad news. Even as the rector and his wife listen to a carol service, the unexpected bad news arrives: "War has been declared" (p. 246). At the end of the novel Adam sits on a splintered stump in "the biggest battlefield of the history of the world" (p. 247). His surroundings are those of The Waste Land and recall that poem's central lament, "O City city" (l. 259).

Like Augustine, Waugh writes "against the pagans." He attacks barbarians whose deficiency in taste stems from their spiritual amnesia. Waugh's work is calculated to demonstrate the difference between shadow and substance and is designed to persuade the reader to exchange his "something or other Eden" for the City of God. The choice between a man-centred and a God-centred world is a question of focus. Should the reader refuse to alter his perspective, he risks the macabre fate of Agatha Runcible, agonized heiress of Victorian nonsense, whose repeated cry is "how too divine" but whose lot is "nothing" (p. 224). As the book opens, Kitty Throbbing and Fanny Blackwater get sick on sham-pain (p. 4), but that is nothing compared to what they may expect. Adam, as his name (Fen-wick) suggests, is the novel's faintest glimmer of hope, for he knows that things must change. But as he slumps on his Eliotic battlefield reading the latest news from home, "the sounds of battle begin to return" (p. 252).

It is neither my purpose nor province to assess the accuracy of Waugh's religious opinions. One could easily explain and approve of Vile Bodies in terms of its polemical successors, for it is certainly possible to see novels like Brideshead Revisited incubating within Vile Bodies. (Like that of Brideshead, the whole movement of Vile Bodies is toward restoration, or counter-inverting the inverted.) But there are better grounds for appreciating Vile Bodies. If one regards it as literature, not as ideology or entertainment, one sees that its real attraction lies in the perfect relationship of its theme - conversion - to its operative metaphor - cinematic inversion. Despite its anti-modernist feeling Vile Bodies is a decidedly modern novel and a highly accomplished one.

NOTES

Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to first editions.

1 Evelyn Waugh, "Personal Call," (London: B.B.C. radio, September 29, 1953).

2 Evelyn Waugh, "Frankly Speaking," (London: B.B.C. radio, November 16, 1953).

3 Charles E. Linck, Jr., "Waugh-Greenidge Film - The Scarlet Woman," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 3, 2 (Autumn 1969), pp. 1-7.

4 Evelyn Waugh, "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High-Necked Jumpers," Georgian Stories, 1926, ed. Alec Waugh (London: Chapman and Hall, 1926), pp. 253-29l.

5 Evelyn Waugh, "The Tutor's Tale: A House of Gentlefolks," The New Decameron: The Fifth Day, ed. Hugh Chesterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1927), pp. 101-106.

6 Heinz Kosok, "The Film World of Vile Bodies," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, 4, 2 (Autumn 1970), pp. 1-2.

7 Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning (London: Chapman and Hall, 1967), p. 69.

8 Evelyn Waugh, "Felix Culpa?" Commonweal, 48 (July 16, 1948), p. 53.

9 Evelyn Waugh, "Matter-of-Fact Mothers of the New Age," Evening Standard (London, April 8, 1929), p. 7.

COUNTERPARTS: THE CLASSIC AND THE MODERN "PERVIGILIUM VENERIS"

J.J. Johnson (Texas Tech University)

The core or center of rest in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall,(1) the structurally central chapter entitled "Pervigilium Veneris," is a satirical transformation, faithful in its modern mirroring, of the classic truths and beauties of the anonymous Latin classic, "Pervigilium Veneris" or "The Vigil of Venus."(2)

Margot Beste-Chetwynde has gathered her friends, the major characters of the novel, at her new mansion for a weekend party in the springtime; the party of the poem is the spring festival of Venus and her guests - the gods and nymphs. During Margot's party, Paul Pennyfeather, the ingenuous everyman, the modern antihero subjected to the powers of a contemporary Venus, does not see his hostess at all, for she has taken Veronal and gone to sleep for three nights. During the poem's festival, Venus also retires for three nights:

Here cheerful choirs for three auspicious nights
With songs prolong the pleasurable rites: (1. 71-2)

The presence of Venus' guests delays her flowering of the earth with beauty and love and, in the same manner, the uniting of Paul and Margot and the subsequent entrance of spring or love into his life are delayed by the presence of guests.

Bacchus, the god of wine and emotional release, is mirrored in Waugh's work in the character of Lord Parakeet who arrives at half-past three in the morning, an hour after everyone has retired for the night. He is drunk and wakes some of the other guests to revive the party. In the poem, Bacchus is introduced in a similar vein:

Here Bacchus revels, deckt with viny leaves;
Here wit's enchanting god, in laurel crowned,
Wakes all the ravished hours with silver sound. (1. 78-80)

Lord Parakeet, like Bacchus, enjoys alcohol and late hours, just as Peter Beste-Chetwynde, the modern counterpart to Cupid, dutifully keeps everyone's glasses full and revives any lagging spirits.

Peter has led Paul Pennyfeather into the affair with Margot. When the guests depart, Peter's designs are fulfilled with the reappearance of Margot. The union is now possible; spring can now arrive: "The meadow of the green glass seemed to burst into flower under her feet, as she passed from the lift to the cocktail table" (p. 342).

Waugh's satirical portrayal of spring at Margot's as a mechanical event occurring in an artificial setting is the modern counterpart of Venus' reappearance, while signals the natural and mystical awakening of earth:

The sap descending o'er her bosom ran,
And all the various sorts of soul began
By wheels unknown to sight, by secret veins
Distilling life; the fruitful goddess reigns
Through all the lovely realms of native day
Through all the circled land and circling sea;
With fertile seed she filled the pervious earth,
And ever fixed the mystic ways of birth. (1. 109-116)

Venus has brought spring to the land where beauty and love grow in nature. Margot, through Peter, has seduced Paul to her modernistic mansion, designed to resemble a factory, and set the mechanics of disaster in motion.

Both the poem and the chapter are filled with corresponding animal and bird imagery. Waugh has transformed the entirely natural presence of animals in the poem in order to exaggerate the already grotesque qualities of Margot's guests. Her classic allusions are characteristically sterilized, made modern through Waugh's scathing vision, when Margot tells Paul his job will be to "protect me from swans" (p. 343) as "Paul's eyes followed the swan gliding serenely across the lake" (p. 343). After Paul is captivated and is ready to marry Margot, "each morning as he dressed, a bird seemed to be singing in his heart" (p. 342). The general presence of birds and the love song of Philomela, the nightingale transformed, are stressed in the last strophe of the poem:

Then deep the swan begins, and deep the song
Runs o'er the water where he sails along. (1. 147-8)

Paul's eyes have been opened, in a comic-classic sense, to the birds and the beauty of Margot's artificial estate by the presence of Margot, just as the appearance of birds and the blossoming of spring are motivated by the appearance of Venus.

The cyclical nature of the novel's controlling picaresque metaphor - the carnival wheel at Luna Park - epitomizes Waugh's modernized, and thus sterilized, version of the seasonal cycle or change which terminates the poem:

And when shall I, and when the swallow sing?
Sweet Philomela, cease; - or here I sit,
And silent loose my rapturous hour of wit.
'Tis gone; the fit retires, the flames decay;
My tuneful Phoebus flies averse away. (1. 158-62). (See also lines 109-116 quoted above.)

This sense of dynamic inevitability, as well as Waugh's underlying theme of portentous human affairs, can also be seen in the poem 's recurring refrain:

Let those love now, who never loved before;
And those who always loved, now love the more.

NOTES

1 Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, Dell Publishing Co., Inc. (New York, 1963). All page references are from this edition.

2 Anonymous, "The Vigil of Venus," Latin Literature in Translation, David McKay Co., Inc. (New York, 1952). All line references are from this text.

MORE ON THE KINGFISHER IMAGE IN BRIDESHEAD

James J. Doherty (University of Notre Dame)

In regard to Daniel J. Canney's note on "The Kingfisher Image in Brideshead" (EWN, Winter 1973) - Waugh's image is clearly derived from Gerard Manley Hopkins' untitled sonnet, "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame" (#57 in the Oxford University Press third edition of Hopkins' Poems). In addition to some similarity of theme between the sonnet and the novel, Waugh's adjective "dappled" in the same sentence gives a strong suggestion of a better known Hopkins' poem in the same vein, "Pied Beauty," which opens with the line "Glory be to God for dappled things."

Perhaps, as Mr. Canney believed, Waugh used "'profane' imagery to convey 'sacred' meaning throughout the novel," but in this passage he merely suggests such connections by calling to mind poems which deal expressly with the profane as a sign of the sacred. Julia "brought to all whose eyes were open to it a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river's bank when the kingfisher flames across dappled water" (p. 180, Little, Brown edition). The simile remains in the realm of the profane.

Hopkins' kingfisher sonnet starts with the notion of "each mortal thing" expressing itself through what it does, but the poem moves to the thought of humans, expressing "Christ":

Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

"Pied Beauty" even more strongly suggests Brideshead's central paradox of grace working through "things counter, original, spare, strange," such as the checkered history of the Flyte family.

THE WHITSTON WAUGH CHECKLIST: ERRATA AND ADDENDA II

Winnifred M. Bogaards

PART I: WORKS BY EVELYN WAUGH

B. Contributions to Books

1 First Appearances

2) Prefaces and Introductions

(b) Fiction

2. Reprinted Material

b) Non-fiction

C. Contributions to Periodicals

1. Fiction

BRIEF COMMENTS

Chapman and Hall has issued a new hard cover edition called The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and Other Stories. The other stories are "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing," Scott-King's Modern Europe, and Love Among the Ruins.

Duckworth is reissuing Rossetti with a new preface by a British critic.

Christopher Sykes has suffered a stroke so the "official biography" of Waugh will be further delayed.

EWN apologizes to Professor Winnifred M. Bogaards for the typographical error quoted in an excerpt from her letter in the last issue. The spelling, of course, was "publicly" until the printers and the proofreaders fumbled the quote.

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. Copyright P.A. Doyle.