EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER

Volume 9 Number 2 - Autumn 1975

EVELYN WAUGH'S RADIO AND TELEVISION BROADCASTS, 1938-1964

Calvin W. Lane (University of Hartford)

In the years from 1938 to 1964, Evelyn Waugh was involved in at least eight interviews and broadcasts for the BBC, now available in the records archives of Broadcast House. A complete listing of Waugh's radio and television appearances is included in Thomas A. Gribble's "Some New Waugh Bibliography," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, Vol. 6, no. 2 (Autumn, 1972),8-10. Several, but not all of the talks, have also been reprinted in The Listener or in Spectator. For those listeners well-acquainted with Waugh's novels, both the content and delivery of the talks surely reinforced an impression of firmly held opinions, of preciseness, and of a vigorous, active mind, never at a loss for the right word, as Julian Jebb has confirmed in the Paris Review interview.(1) The broadcasts convey a certainty of opinion long since arrived at, but a certainty generally free from unthinking dogma. Waugh's rather high pitched, carefully articulated tone of voice was well-adapted to the conventions of radio and television, and reveals an individual quite at ease in a medium of the modern world he so often excoriated, the one exception being the infamous "Face to Face" broadcast in the course of which he was subjected to a deliberately rude form of probing interrogation, and very nearly lost his composure.

The first broadcast, "Up to London," delivered on July 21,1938, is a lightly witty consideration, reminiscent of Vile Bodies, of the London debutante season. He describes this ritual as:

connected with the business of 'coming out' which no male can ever fathom. The mistake comes from giving girls far too good a time in the schoolroom. In the old days they were given the ugliest clothes and dullest food and told to be silent.

In the classroom, they are taught three simple topics of conversation: "one spirited, one high brow, one flirtatious."

The following year, in "Undergraduate Summer," a speech delivered at the Oxford Union on July 31, and broadcast on November 8, he was asked to deliver remarks on the negative side of "Should we keep the home fires burning." He responded facetiously, with digs at The Times and the New Statesman: "Any adult or boy can tell - what you can't do is to light a fire with The Times, or for that matter, with the New Statesman." But he backhandedly praised newspapers in general "on keeping the home fires burning," and ended his remarks by "congratulating the more inflammatory part of the press."

One of the most valuable broadcasts, at least for the scholar interested in studying the alchemy by which a novelist transmits his personal life and opinions into fiction, is the "Frankly Speaking" interview conducted by three BBC interrogators on November 11, 1953, and broadcast on November 16. Seemingly intended to provoke, the general line of the questioning was at times insolently rude. From the outset, Waugh quickly became aware of his questioners' efforts to catch him off base. When asked if he saw any future for mankind, he quietly but positively remarked that "this all smacks of 'Have you stopped beating your wife.'" He did answer the question, however, in noting that if it implied "a happy, prosperous time to come, I would say not." At no time did he allow himself to be maneuvered into an outburst of rage, for his answers were crisp, detailed, and courtly in manner, although at one point he snapped "I clearly can't make myself understood."

After posing several fairly routine questions relating to Waugh's tour of duty with the Royal Marines, the interviewers shifted to Waugh's practice as a writer. Some of the replies, as one might have anticipated, indicate his meticulousness in revising and his recognition, as he began to age, that he could no longer turn out a book in a couple of months. When queried "Why do you write?" a certain hesitancy in answering suggests that he was taken aback by the question. Following a long pause, he said, "I wish to make pleasant objects, works of art exterior to myself."

Subsequent questions touched on his family and his leisure interests. In responding to the inquiry "Do you play with your children," Waugh grandly retorted "Not when they are infantile, but when they get to the age of clear speech and clearness of reason, I associate with them." The interviewers then changed to a different tack in asking "Do you have many Catholic friends?," followed by one even more casually insolent, "Do you like the human race?" to which he answered "liking the human race is a prerogative of God."

Unable to shake the composure of their harassed but verbally adroit opponent, the interviewers returned to more legitimate questioning. Waugh remarked of the novelist's use of material that it is simply a way of looking at things, of what the author takes in: "For Jane Austen it is what she sees within a radius of five miles. Others, Conrad, for example, have to go over the seven seas to find material."

Near the conclusion of the interview when Waugh was asked the rather startling question "Do you find any failings in yourself?" he countered with "Do you mean a moral lapse or inadequacies in talent?" and then balked his inquisitors by way of generalized comment on the "inadequacies" of his daily life. In his final remark, Waugh quietly stated, "I should like people in their charity to pray for my soul as a sinner."

On the whole, Waugh held up remarkably well under the condescending manner of his questioners, and it was he who emerged the victor in the end. Temporarily nettled by this intrusion into his privacy and by the insinuatingly malicious tone of the interviewers, he later turned the episode to effective use in the opening pages of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Gilbert Pinfold reflects:-

The questions were civil enough in form but Mr. Pinfold thought he could detect an underlying malice. Angel seemed to believe that anyone sufficiently eminent to be interviewed by him must have something to hide, must be an impostor whom it was his business to trap and expose ... There was the hint of the underdog's snarl which Mr. Pinfold recognized from his press cuttings."(2)

Readers of the novel will recall that the voices of the interviewers continue to haunt Pinfold throughout the long sea voyage from London to Ceylon, thus clearly emphasizing the traumatic nature of the experience for Pinfold/Waugh. A few days after the broadcast, a writer for the Spectator noted:

I never heard an interview conducted in public on such ill-natured terms … Protected only by a vulnerable breastwork of prejudices and convictions, Mr. Waugh stuck to his dandiacal guns; and although they had the initiative, I thought he emerged with far more credit than the three colourless and curiously uniform voices who prosecuted so relentlessly their purpose of proving that Mr. Waugh is somehow letting down the Common Man."(3)

Seven years later, when questioned by John Freeman, in a more friendly televized interview ("Face to Face," June 26, 1960) as to whether or not he had any feelings about the 1953 BBC interviewers, he simply replied "No," and that was an end to it.

Several of Waugh's comments in the Freeman interview were to be included in the autobiographical A Little Learning, published in 1964. Waugh spoke at length about his childhood, his years at Lancing ("I took jolly good care not to play the fool in school or chapel"), and of his religious doubts on reading Pope's Essay on Man at age sixteen. His remarks on the Oxford years were quite brief and contained none of the more highly flavored diary confidences that appeared in the Observer. He remarked that he "got tight," and spent a lot of time "entertaining, making new friends, and writing a series of articles for undergrad magazines." His father "gave me more than I needed, and I spent twice as much." When the questioning shifted to the early years of his writing career, he stated that he was not a Catholic when writing Vile Bodies and that he was "as near an atheist as one can be." On being asked about his conversion Waugh reflected that from about the age of sixteen he realized that "Catholicism was Christianity" and that his eventual acceptance of the Church was a "conversion to Christianity rather than conversion to Catholicism." He had had no doubts since other than "exasperation at individual clergymen," perhaps in remembrance of the rough handling given Black Mischief in The Tablet.

Freeman next asked, "Would you discourage us into reform?" Waugh answered "No, I am just trying to write books ..." and that it wouldn't occur to him to "sit down to write a book about gangs." In Helena, his favorite ("Much the best written"), he told the story of "a simple English girl greatly to her disgust thrown into the imperial life," who put her finger on what was wrong in Rome: "a losing sense of actuality." Somewhat in contradiction of his earlier remark that he had no intention of reforming mankind, he added that "indeed, it was a didactic book." Of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold he corroborated what he wrote in the preface to the novel, that the work was an "almost exact report of his condition" at the time.

In a series of concluding questions about his withdrawn life in the country, Waugh responded that he "got bored largely because of deafness," that he did not miss the literary world, that he had not "the smallest interest in country life, and that he was "much more at ease with fellow Catholics than … with heathens or Protestants."

"P. G. Wodehouse, an Act of Homage and Reparation," recorded on June 20th, 1961, and broadcast on July 15th was reprinted in the Sunday Times and is readily available to scholars. Prepared as a tribute to Wodehouse on his 80th birthday, Waugh's now famous remarks vigorously defended Wodehouse's conduct during World War II, and highly praised the sturdy craftsmanship of his novels. In Wodehouse's fiction one finds "technical excellence achieved by sheer hard work, the antithesis of Ronald Firbank … Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale ... a world for us to live in and delight in."

Two years later, BBC recorded (June 25, 1963) Waugh's remarks on his being admitted to membership in the Royal Society of Literature. In a lightly witty, graceful after dinner speech, what he said about the writer's trade further emphasizes a viewpoint he had developed in previous interviews:

"The word 'companionship' is not often associated with our essentially solitary, and often acrimonious trade ... We are not a clique ... but simply hard working writers who have done nothing but write all our lives and tried to learn our difficult trade as best we can in solitude. The bond that unites us is our devotion to the English language in trying to use it so that we do not disgrace our predecessors."

Waugh's last interview ("Evelyn Waugh Talks to Elizabeth Jane Howard," edited extracts from Monitor, BBC television, February 16, 1964), a somberly reflective commentary, was largely devoted to matters of critical taste, and in retrospect, was an unintended valedictory farewell. It is also of significance concerning Waugh's views on the writing of fiction and for its confirmation of a darkening mood as he grew older.

Ms. Howard began by asking Waugh if he regarded his life's work as over. He replied that he wished he "could say so ... writers have to go on and on until they drop." He also felt that his writing skill was "no worse than it was" but that he no longer wrote in his earlier comic vein for "the particular quality of being comic is a function of youth." When the interviewer expressed her opinion that a novelist can develop only a very few characters, most of them aspects of one's self, Waugh generally agreed, and asserted that there are a "limited number of characters in the world," and "certainly a limited number one man can cope with." Paradoxically and unexpectedly (considering the number of characters whose lives are grotesquely snuffed out in his novels - Prendergast, Agatha Runcible, Prudence Courtenay, Apthorpe, etc.) he advised young novelists "never kill off your characters!"

P. G. Wodehouse was so brilliantly successful as a writer of fiction because he wisely confined himself to a limited number of characters, and at eighty was "still producing work as clear and fresh as he was producing sixty years ago." This remark provides yet more evidence of Waugh's high regard for Wodehouse's devotion to craftsmanship in creating a wildly imaginative, unreal world in which his farcical characters thrive. Waugh's observations in this interview also reveal the concern of the satirist with recognizable types rather than with individuals. The gently idiotic Bertie Woosters who throng Wodehouse's fiction are at the far end of the spectrum from, say, the rapacious Basil Seal, but in their limited, one-dimensional understanding of the fictional world they inhabit they have a comic function similar to the obtusely single-minded behavior of Basil, Lady Circumference, Sir Joseph Mainwaring, and other of Waugh's types.

Waugh expressed his displeasure with most contemporary fiction in bluntly stating "I don't like many modern novelists ... they certainly aren't reticent." A few sentences later he added" I am awfully shocked by slovenly work" and "shocked by indecent words." To illustrate the former, he cited the instance of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein: "... a poor, dotty Irishman, Joyce, ... wrote absolute rot. He began writing quite well, ... but you can watch him going mad sentence by sentence." Ulysses is "perfectly sane for a bit, and then Americans hired him to write Finnegan's Wake ... Gertrude Stein happened to be a clever, amusing gal, no booby to meet, but the minute she started putting pen to paper - gibberish." In backhanded tribute to Gertrude Stein he noted that he met "her off and on - never at her home in Paris. She was always on top of the conversation, clever as be damned."

The interview drew to a close with a few wry remarks on his increasingly isolated personal life as he became advanced in years: "I like to meet my old friends and see them decaying," and am "rather pleased they are decaying faster." Becoming yet more melancholy, he said that he was "frightened of old age," and that he dreaded "four score ten ... old, impotent, a bore, nothing to do. Perhaps that is why I hope war will break out and someone will kindly drop a bomb on me." On listening to remarks such as these, it is temptingly easy to draw parallels with the final years of other satirists turned misanthrope such as Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, but on the other hand although there may be some corrective truth in Auberon Waugh's heated assertion that his father's last years were comparatively tranquil,(4) what Evelyn Waugh said in this interview offers a degree of evidence that like Swift and Twain, balked by repeated examples of the world's madness, hypocrisy, and injustice (esp. as can be read in the latter third of Sword of Honour) he withdrew into a largely self-imposed exile from most of human society.

In summarizing the broadcasts, one's final impression is that they contribute to our understanding of Waugh's complex being and to his beliefs about writings - beliefs that were never formalized in a volume of criticism, but are everywhere evident in his book-reviewing and in occasional passages of his fiction, and help to affirm, as Robert Murray Davis has noted in "Evelyn Waugh on the Art of Fiction," that Waugh had "a consistent theory of the goals and means of fiction."(5)

NOTES

1. Julian Jebb, interviewer, "The Art of Fiction XXX: Evelyn Waugh," Paris Review 8 (Summer-Fall 1963), 72-85. Reprinted in Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series (New York: Viking, 1967), pp. 103-114.

2. See Chapter I, "Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age," p. 23, Little, Brown edition.

3. "A Spectator's Notebook," Spectator, 191 (November 20, 1953), 557.

4. Auberon Waugh, "Death in the Family," Spectator, 216 (May 6, 1966), 562-563.

5. Robert Murray Davis, "Evelyn Waugh on the Art of Fiction," Papers on Language and Literature, 2 (Summer, 1966), 243-252.

BRIDESHEAD, OR PROUST AND GIDE REVISITED

Francis S. Heck (University of Wyoming)

To date, critics have already signaled Proustian themes in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. In 1964, Marston LaFrance indicated the Proustian passage at the beginning of Book II, which is entitled "A Twitch Upon the Thread."(1) Thomas Churchill, in 1967, spoke of the "Proustian sound of the book."(2) In 1971, David Lodge stated that "the whole novel is Proustian in feeling."(3) In Brideshead itself, there are two specific references worth noting: the first is the fact that Anthony Blanche dined with Proust and Gide, and the second occurs when Samgrass says to Charles Ryder: "I have been spending a cosy afternoon before the fire with the incomparable Charlus."(4)

While the presence of Proust and of Gide is felt in the reading of Brideshead, Waugh's characters are only superficially related to those of the French writers. One might say, for example, that Anthony Blanche is Gide's Passavant (Les Faux-Monnayeurs) inasmuch as he is a homosexual esthete, but that he is Proust's Bloch insofar as he speaks ill of the hero's friend. A detailed comparison of the characters is, then, necessarily inconclusive. A review of some of the themes presented in Waugh's novel, however, will offer points of contact, especially between Brideshead and Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.5

Among the minor themes might be mentioned the fact that both Ryder and Proust's narrator, Marcel, are readers of Ruskin (Proust translated The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and the Lilies). Secondly, there exists in Brideshead and in A la recherche a latent King Lear theme: Lord Marchmain's younger daughter, Cordelia, remains attached to him and to the family tradition; Proust's Charlus becomes a semi-invalid, half mad, running about the streets of Paris (Lear) with the faithful Jupien at his heels (the Fool) (III,859). The Lear theme is later hinted at when Julia is dismayed as the storm which covered her "madness," (her affair with Ryder), is abated: "Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?" (p. 261). Thirdly, in both works, there is a young man's deception on being presented to a notorious femme fatale. On meeting Cara, Lord Marchmain's mistress, Ryder is disappointed because she is not a "voluptuous Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque," but rather plain (p. 100). Likewise, Marcel speaks of his deception on being introduced to Odette, who, he concludes, is not very different from other beautiful women that he has seen (I,76-77). Fourthly, when Anthony Blanche takes Ryder into the Blue Grotto Club, the latter is astonished to discover that it is a homosexual bar; Marcel innocently enters the Maison de Jupien and he is startled by the customs of the house (III,823). Fifthly, in one instance at least, Waugh adopts the Proustian method of mentioning a character, abandoning it, then reintroducing it later: Celia, Boy Mulcaster's sister, is casually referred to by Samgrass early in the novel, and only reappears years later as Ryder's wife. Albertine is actually mentioned twice by Proust by her first name before she is introduced to the reader as Albertine Simonet much later (I,844). Finally, Lady Marchmain's cluster of satellites, represented by the poet Adrian Porson, is reminiscent of the habitués of the "clan" of Proust's Mme Verdurin. Biche renounces this "clan," which has been stifling his creativity, in order to become the painter Elstir. Of Porson, it is said that he is "bled dry; there's nothing left of him" (p. 56).

More important themes are presented in both Waugh and in Proust. No doubt, foremost is the theme of childhood innocence. For Sebastian, the nostalgia is perpetuated by the presence of his teddy-bear, his visits to Nanny Hawkins, and later by drink in order to escape the reality of adult life. For Ryder, this magical nostalgia will not be associated with childhood as such, but rather the period (his Oxford days and after), during which he is associated with Sebastian ("Et in Arcadia Ego"). Later, on looking back on the previous ten years of his life, Ryder says that "never did I come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing" (p. 226). As for Marcel, like Sebastian, it is his early childhood, the good-night kiss from his mother, the affection of his grandmother, his magic lantern, and the walks in two possible directions (toward Swann or toward the Guermantes). These fond childhood memories of Marcel are what Germaine Brée refers to as "les vertus de Combray,"(6) and, obviously, the "Sebastian period" is the high point of Ryder's life.

Snobbism is common to both writers. Edmund Wilson states that in Brideshead it emerges "shameless and rampant.(7) James F. Carens says of the snobbism that lithe satirical rejection of the young Hooper, of Father Mackay, and of Rex Mottram - in short of the middle and lower orders of society - is complete.(8) Hopper's familiarity ("Rightyoh") and his off-handed manners irk Ryder probably to the same extent that Morel's equalitarian pose annoys Marcel. (Morel is the son of a former valet of the latter's granduncle, II,264). Legrandin is the perfectly obvious snob inasmuch as he wants to play on both teams at once, the aristocrats and the bourgeois. Snobbism is also illustrated in the question of marriages: these are determined to be good or bad depending on the social scale of each of the parties involved. Hence, the Julia-Rex Mottram marriage is a poor one because Rex is a Canadian upstart from an obscure background; likewise Odette is considered a poor choice for the cultured Swann because of her past reputation as a prostitute and her lack of social status. But it is the incomparable Charlus who is the snob par excellence. When the rich bourgeoise, Mme Verdurin, asks him in jest if he would recommend to her a nobleman to be her concierge, he replies haughtily that it would be to her detriment, since all visitors henceforth would come no closer than to the lodge of the concierge (II,967).

Another Proustian theme is introduced when Ryder says at one point that he begins "to realize how little I really knew Sebastian" (p. 94). This inability to really know another person is a theme running all through A la recherche. Francoise, Legrandin, and Gilberte are early examples of this inability for Marcel, so that he should not have been too disappointed in his discoveries about Albertine. As the object of his love, she is the one person that he wishes to know intimately, but he is forced to admit that there are several Albertines, each rigidly separated one from the other (III,149). As a result of this situation, lovers are little more than strangers, each in his or her own solitude. The theme is developed more extensively by Proust, but it has an important role in Brideshead as well.

Death occupies an important position in both Brideshead and in A la recherche. More important than death, however, are the feelings of guilt on the part of the living, who react profoundly to these losses. Julia has guilt feelings since her mother's (Lady Marchmain's) death: "Mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more cruelly than her own deadly illness" (p. 338). Later, upon her father's death, she decides to give up Ryder because of her guilty feelings. Marcel feels that the revelations about Albertine's Lesbian past are a punishment for his inability to have prevented the death of his grandmother (II,1115). He is even harder on himself later after Albertine's death, accusing himself for having caused both her death and that of his grandmother (III,501).

"My theme is memory." says Ryder. Furthermore, he deems that his fondest memories are "the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime" (p. 225). These "vital hours" occur only rarely because we are under the burden of life's demands and pressures, "till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed ... pause, breathe freely and take our bearings" (p. 226). In dropping behind, we escape from normal time into what Proust would call those privileged moments, when we are, as it were, outside of time. By means of a metaphor, a correspondence between a moment in the present and a moment of the past, we are able to relive intensely a past experience, but now this experience is beyond time (III,889). For Proust, any object might be the agent to precipitate the process: a piece of cake, the sound of a spoon against a glass, or uneven pavestones on a walk. For Ryder, it is the name of Brideshead itself heard again after many years, "for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight" (p. 15). It is the involuntary memory that takes over in a powerful feeling of emotion which temporarily consumes its willing victim. Later, of course, the only way to perpetuate the memory will be by means of a work of art, the book itself before the reader.

This still leaves untouched an integral part of Brideshead, namely the religious problem. Here an analogy with Gide's La Porte étroite might be invaluable. Succinctly, Julia, at the end of Brideshead, becomes an Alissa in that she renounces Ryder because she does not wish to "set up a rival good to God's" (p. 340). Both heroines feel the same saintly duty to give up what they desire the most, the object of their love (and they both take this step upon or shortly after the death of a father). For Alissa, there is, at least at this sublime moment, a mystical aura enshrouding her decision to renounce Jérôme and to begin the "better life."(9) Ryder's acquiescence, moreover, is similar to the passivity of Jérôme. For Waugh, this renunciation in Brideshead is an example of his Catholicism, which "emerged gradually in his novels as a positive answer to the plight of the individual."(10) For Gide, even though personally opposed to a renunciation such as Alissa's (because of the religious motivation), the spell of Alissa works on him to the extent that "La Porte étroite, despite the final solitude and despair of Alissa, stands as one of the most successful novels in the twentieth century on the subject of spirituality."(11)

In conclusion, these Proustian and Gidian affinities do not in any way diminish the power and the attraction of Brideshead; on the contrary, they are a more compelling reason why Brideshead should be revisited.

NOTES

1. Marston LaFrance, "Context and Structure of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited," Twentieth Century Literature, 10 (April 1964), 14.

2. Thomas Churchill, "The Trouble with Brideshead Revisited," Modern Language Quarterly, xxviii, 2 (June 1967), 225.

3. David Lodge, Evelyn Waugh (New York: Columbia University, 1971), p. 31.

4. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945 ; the Proust-Gide allusion is found on p. 46, and the one to Charlus is on p. 124. The 1945 edition of Brideshead is chosen instead of the later revision (1960) because datewise it is closer to the dates of the works of Proust and of Gide. (Hereafter referred to in the text as Brideshead.)

5. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954. Hereafter referred to in the text as A la recherche.

6. Germaine Brée, Du Temps perdu au Temps retrouvé (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950), p. 162.

7. Edmund Wilson, "Splendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh," in Classics and Commercials (New York: Farrar and Straus, 1950), p. 300.

8. James F. Carens, The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh (Seattle: University of Washington, 1966) p. 109.

9. Andre Gide, La Porte étroite, in Romans, Récits, et Soties, Œuvres lyriques (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothéque de la Pléiade, 1958, p. 578.

10. Carens, p. 54.

11. See Wallace Fowlie, André Gide: His Life and Art (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 66.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

(David Cliffe's note : There is no name attached to this letter. As it is in response to Auberon Waugh's letter in EWN 9-1 [Spring 1975] condemning the identification of General Laycock as the original of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook - in Sword of Honour - given in Donald Greene's article "Sir Ralph Brompton : An Identification" in EWN 8-3 [Winter 1974], one conjectures that it is by Donald Greene himself .)

Dear Sir,

Auberon Waugh (Newsletter Vol. 9. no. 1) has a point: there are difficulties in establishing a one-to-one equation of Ben Ritchie-Hook with Sir Robert Laycock, the most serious of which is that Ritchie-Hook was a hero of the first World War, whereas Laycock, only in his thirties at the time of his commando exploits, was too young to have taken part in it. And Ritchie-Hook's crude manners and battered appearance do not much resemble those of the handsome and diplomatic Laycock.

But of course all such "identifications" of fictional characters are to be understood as approximations - hints that the novelist takes from people he has known, or known of, and then weaves into fantasies to suit his novelistic purposes. No one who has made his way through Harold Nicolson's output of autobiographical and other writings will believe that he was as sinister a character as Sir Ralph Brompton. The late Lady Cunard was surely not so uninformed as "old Ruby" of the Dorchester (nor was her husband, Sir Bache Cunard, "in Asquith's cabinet"). And to take, from A Little Learning, a comic fantasy that did not get into the novels, no one believes that Dean Cruttwell of Hertford College, Oxford, had a sexual hang-up on dogs, or believes that Evelyn Waugh believed it. One can only sum up the problem in the immortal words of Mr. Salter: "Up to a point, Lord Copper."

Sometimes, too, hints from several sources may be combined into a composite fictional character, and this may well be the case with Ritchie-Hook. In the history of the British armed forces (and those of other countries) there are innumerable legendary figures of undisciplined individual prowess, such as Steven Marcus's obscure Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle. And let us not forget what Ritchie-Hook's name may owe to the Captain Hook of Peter Pan.

The question here is what figures historically connected with British Combined Operations in World War II of whom Waugh had cognizance are most likely to have contributed to Ritchie-Hook. One, perhaps, was the first Director of Combined Operations, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, the hero of the raid on Zeebrugge in the first war, who seems to have been quite as "abrasive" as Ritchie-Hook. One history of Combined Ops (Bernard Fergusson's The Watery Maze, 1961) records of Keyes:

He once told the assembled Chiefs of Staff that they were "yellow" - an opportunity that comes the way of few … Former Commandos, full of strange oaths and mindful of the days when they were bearded like the pard, still swear by him, and maintain that it was he who endowed them with much of their legendary spirit -

which is exactly Ritchie-Hook's function in Men at Arms.

Ritchie-Hook is represented by Waugh as the commander of a support brigade in the abortive raid on Dakar in September, 1940. No such brigade seems to have existed; the actual commander of the Royal Marines brigade which formed part of the expedition was a Brigadier St. Clair-Morford.(1) It was however his superior, the force commander, Major-General Noel Irwin, who, like Ritchie-Hook, fell into disfavor with the authorities for, as Winston Churchill put it, "pressing for audacious courses."

To rehabilitate Ritchie-Hook, Waugh has Churchill writing,

P. M. to Secretary of State for War.
I have directed that no commander be penalized for errors in discretion towards the enemy (Officers and Gentlemen, Book I, Chap. 4).

What Churchill actually wrote to the War Office, instructing that/Irwin be returned to active service, was

... any error towards the enemy and any evidence of a sincere desire to engage must always be generously judged (Churchill, The Second World War, II [1949], 584).

One wonders how many such details Waugh, in his war trilogy, owed to Churchill and other histories.

Auberon Waugh suggests that "so far as Laycock has any fictional counterpart he is Colonel Tommy Blackhouse." Yet Laycock was commander of "Layforce" - apparently the only formation in the history of Combined Ops to be thus named after its commander - whereas Blackhouse is only deputy commander of "Hookforce," named after Ritchie-Hook. When Ritchie-Hook is lost in the interior of Africa, Blackhouse temporarily becomes its acting commander. But he is not involved in the actual fighting in Crete, as Laycock was; he breaks his leg on the way there, and returns to Alexandria. After the withdrawal from Crete, Ritchie-Hook turns up again and resumes command of what is left of Hookforce. At the beginning of Unconditional Surrender, we read, "The First Battalion … followed Ritchie-Hook, biffing across the sands of North Africa." Blackhouse had nothing to do with this, having been sent back to England on other duties. Ritchie-Hook's "biffing" sounds very much like the commando operations in November, 1941, raids on four key points behind the German-Italian lines, including one of Rommel's headquarters led by Laycock himself. It was unsuccessful, but Laycock and a sergeant escaped and after thirty-six days of making their way through the desert, subsisting on such things as the entrails of a dead goat, were finally picked up by the advancing Eighth Army. The sergeant was particularly happy to be rescued, we are told, since Laycock whiled away the time on their journey by reading aloud to him The Wind in the Willows. "Safe at last!" the sergeant ejaculated. "Now, thank God, I shan't have to hear any more of that bloody Mr. Toad." There is something Hookish about this; it is hard to see the soberly professional Tommy Blackhouse indulging in such whimsy.

Waugh, incidentally, earned a small niche in the highly popular booklet, propaganda as much as history, entitled Combined Operations: The Official Story of the Commandos(2) issued by His Majesty's Stationery Office and published in America by Macmillan in 1943: "The general opinion of this dive-bombing [in Crete] was expressed by Captain Evelyn Waugh, who, after experiencing it for some time, said that like all things German it was very efficient and went on much too long" (p. 38).

On the subject of "identifications," that of Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited with Brendan Bracken, mentioned in Jeffrey Heath's survey (Vol. 9, no. 1), surely cannot be maintained. The "brash Canadian adventurer" is very much Canadian, not Australian as Bracken was. "We don't take much account of Catholics in Canada" is, or was, the authentic voice of Protestant Canada, in particular of English-speaking Montreal, where Rex Mottram began his murky career and where the prime "brash Canadian adventurer," financial, political, and journalistic, of the twentieth century made his first million. One name leaps to the mind - that of Max Aitken (which sounds rather like "Rex Mottram"), who later became Lord Beaverbrook (and, in Waugh, Lord Copper, Lord Monomark - also named Rex - and perhaps Lord Metroland). The time has been somewhat pushed forward: as A. J. P. Taylor's fine biography (Beaverbrook, 1972) will confirm, the Rex Mottram of the 1920s is rather in the position of the Max Aitken of 1910 or thereabouts.

To be sure, Rex Mottram "was on easy terms with 'Max' and 'F.E.' [Lord Birkenhead]" and others, and Taylor informs us (p. 678), "I have Evelyn Waugh's authority for stating that Beaverbrook was not the original of Lord Copper." But every novelist has the right to throw a little dust in the reader's eyes and to deny that he has written merely a roman à clef. Taylor, in whose opinion Waugh was "the greatest novelist of the age," adds a cryptic footnote: "If he [Beaverbrook] had really not read Waugh's novels he must have had a sixth sense. I heard a journalist try on him the immortal phrase, 'Up to a point, sir.' He replied cheerfully, 'The idea's no good, eh?'"

NOTES

1. The one landing made at Dakar (corresponding to Ritchie-Hook's on "Beach A") is described by Fergusson (p. 64): "There had been an alternative plan, agreed on at Freetown, that if Dakar proved impossible Free French marines should try their luck at landing on a beach a few miles from the town. (Not much was known to the British about this beach, except that Admiral Cunningham suddenly remembered having done some surf-riding on it as a midshipman thirty-six years before.) This plan was set in motion during the afternoon. There was a delay, not wholly accounted for to this day, about their getting in, and when they did they were rebuffed; and in the late evening the whole force drew off."

2. The (anonymous) work is excellently written, and one wonders whether Waugh, who was at loose ends during 1942 and 1943, may not have had a hand in it. Other novelists attached to Combined Operations were Nevil Shute and Robert Henriques.

BOOK REVIEW

The Ackerley Letters, ed. Neville Braybrooke. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1975. $15.00, 354 pages. Reviewed by Paul A. Doyle.

J.R. Ackerley, who died in 1967, is best known as book editor of The Listener. Of over 1500 letters available, Braybrooke has selected 340 of the most fascinating and most important. The Ackerley correspondence is a delight for anyone who wishes to know more about twentieth century British arts and letters; Ackerley's friendship with E.M. Forster is just one indicator of this volume's value. Braybrooke's work as editor is exemplary. He has written a graceful, informative introduction, given indispensable background data, and footnoted thoroughly but judiciously.

There are five references to Waugh. In a Spectator review Evelyn lauded Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday as "A book ... difficult to praise ... temperately. " Evelyn was able to arrange for Chapman and Hall to send The Listener review copies of Put Out More Flags and also other future publications from their lists, but could not contribute an article on The Grand Tour which Ackerley requested. Ackerley mentioned Waugh's genius in creating the memorable character of Apthorpe.

IN MEMORIAM

We deeply mourn the untimely passing of Dean Marston LaFrance of Carleton University. Professor LaFrance was a widely known scholar and a regular contributor to EWN. His friendliness, erudition, wit, and graceful writing style were particularly notable. Waughians have lost an expert researcher and devoted teacher.

BRIEF NOTES

The English Department of the University of South Florida announces a new journal Scholia Satyrica which will publish articles of learned criticism on the nature of satire generally and on the tradition of learned wit in particular. Articles on particular authors and works are welcome, as well as original satire. Material under 5000 words preferred, following MLA Style Sheet, should be sent to R.D. Wyly, Editor, Scholia Satyrica, Engl. Dept., University of South Florida, Tampa 33620. Subscriptions: $3.50 per year.

Reader John Lulves writes: "Those who have difficulty in acquiring certain works of Waugh may be interested to know that Andrew Prosser, Jr. (3118 North Keating Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60641), a bookseller who specializes in Chesterton and Belloc, is generally able to provide any Waugh title and some books about Waugh.

Protests are in order against the Dell Publishing Co., 1 Dag Hammerskjold Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017 because they have just let Brideshead Revisited go out of print, even though this classic has gone through numerous paperback printings.

Readers who missed the limited edition of John St. John's To the War With Waugh (reviewed EWN, Autumn 1973) can procure a trade edition from British publisher Leo Cooper Ltd., for £1.95.

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.