EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER

Volume 9 Number 3 - Winter 1975

EVELYN WAUGH: AFRAID OF THE SHADOW

Jeffrey Heath (University of Toronto)

… I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you,
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The Waste Land, I. 27-30

The epigraph to A Handful of Dust, with its stress on fear and shadows, is more than just a source for a title. It is nothing less than Waugh's capsule comment on his polemical aim and satiric method, for it is by making the reader uneasily aware of shadows, or inversions, that Waugh tries to lead him toward "something different": conversion.

It is Waugh's triumph, perhaps unique in this century's literature of persuasion, that he is able to make his reader laugh while inducing in him the vague alarm out of which new perspectives are built. To fully understand Waugh's fiction, it is necessary to see that it constitutes an extended attack on the attempts of the City of Man to become an Eden by aping the City of God. Waugh's invariable purpose is to incite his reader to reject one city and accept the other.

Waugh is concerned with pre-choice as well as with choice, for each reader must be made aware that he actually has options before he can choose. One sure way of opening the reader's mind to alternative thought-processes is to supply him with a problem which defies resolution according to his everyday postulates. Each Waugh novel therefore is, or contains, a puzzle which serves to discredit the reader's normal assumptions. Through a combination of "puzzle" situations and a subtle rhetoric of anxiety, Waugh sows the seeds of dilemma on grounds of complacency.

In A Handful of Dust, as in his other novels. Waugh relies on the tactics of silence. By means of calculated reticence Waugh prompts the reader to suspect that he is missing the novel's full meaning. This sense of lost meaning is a miniature of the reader's misgivings about the coherence of life itself. Waugh's first manoeuvre is to suppress the connectives in chains of cause and effect. In A Handful of Dust, for example, Tony Last observes that no one is to blame for the death of his son John Andrew; then he embarks on a search for Eldorado; then he encounters Mr. Todd - but Waugh carefully avoids suggesting a casual relationship between these events.

Waugh's second stratagem is to provoke the reader's desire for an object of ultimate blame and then to withhold it. Waugh lures the reader into a small but efficient anxiety-machine and teases him into the search for an explanation which will resolve his distress. But the search for blame involves the reader in a tailspin to a Kafkaesque realm where, as Tony Last would say, "No one [is] to blame."(1) Waugh provides no ultimate foothold of blame in his fictional universe because there is no admission of blame (or sin) in the world he criticizes. Waugh's satiric strategy is built on the simple insight that human beings like to explain through assigning blame. In A Handful of Dust Waugh plays on this weakness to teach his readers an unforgettable lesson. Waugh first of all establishes a "debate" (or puzzle) between the merits of Victorianism and Modernism (or Hetton Abbey and London, as embodied in Tony and Brenda Last). In a book where so little is offered in the way of an identifiable good, the reader tends to make an explanatory choice between humanism and animalism. But even as Waugh sets up his dichotomy, he puts into operation a pervasive system of innuendo which demonstrates (but only to the perceptive reader) that the apparent opposites are really similars. Whether the reader blames Tony or whether he blames the "animal-world" of John Beaver, he is caught.

What advantage does Waugh win through this strategy of false options and ironic disclaimers? For one thing he is able to show that the modern reader's cultural bankruptcy prevents him from seeing the real terms of meaningful choice. The reader with no ear for irony is relegated to outer darkness. He attempts, all earnestness, to explain Waugh's fiction in terms of blame, complete with culprits on the one hand and heroes on the other. He does not see that the "debate" between Tony and Brenda is a red herring: he does not see that the real choice is not between humanism and animalism at all but between both of them lumped together and the City of God. The choice of a sympathetic figure within the book, as it were, is therefore an example of the premature and limited choice-making which goes on daily within the City of Man. Such a choice brings down Waugh's fictional booby-trap around the reader's ears; at one stroke Waugh condemns both the reader and the object of his approval. But all this does not rule out the possibility of a learning experience for the persevering reader, who is often led by a series of recognitions to convert the decoy choice-situation into the terms of meaningful choice. And at the same time he is brought to see that if blame exists anywhere, it exists within himself.

Fear, then, is important, but shadows are even more so. In Waugh's Augustinian perspective, the City of Man is a shadow of the City of God - a threatening rival, a duplicate - a "something or other Eden" as Ginger Littlejohn says in Vile Bodies (p. 222). Waugh implies that things have somehow become inverted in the modern world. We worship the negative as the print; we pay homage to shadows, not substance. According to Waugh, shadows have gained the upper hand, and all his fiction implies that the inverted must be re-inverted. Or to phrase it another way, there is a greater need than ever for the Counter-Reformation which never reached England. (When Waugh uses inversions we may be sure that he has in mind the need for conversion.) Waugh hates shadows, or imitations, and that is why, in A Handful of Dust, he undertakes to show his reader "something different" from "your shadow at morning" and "your shadow at evening."

My comments would end here were it not for my conviction that Waugh's fiction transcends the level of mere propaganda. I would like to suggest that Waugh's accomplished polemics spring from an inner debate where shadows of a theological nature are rooted in shadows of a personal nature. The most recurrent gesture in Waugh's fiction is the protagonist's attempt to escape from the pernicious influence of a shadow, or double:

The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but apart from them we are seldom single and unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflexions and counterfeits of ourselves - the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breath freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.

This remarkable passage appears only in the first edition of Brideshead Revisited (p.198) "We are seldom single or unique … counterfeits of ourselves … all in our own image … outdistance our shadows …" Phrases like these compel us to pay serious attention to relationships like those of Paul Pennyfeather and Potts, in Decline and Fall, the two Boots and Mr. Baldwin in Scoop, Basil Seal and Mr. Todhunter in Put Out More Flags, Charles Ryder and "Captain Foulenough" in Brideshead Revisited, Guy Crouchback and Apthorpe in Men at Arms and Tony Last and the sinister Mr. Todd in A Handful of Dust.

The protagonist's attempt to elude his shadow (and he often has more than one) succeeds or fails according to his heroism or moral insight. If he "dodges" or "pushes ahead" through a decisive or heroic act, like Charles or Guy, then the leech-like shadow drops away, or is "arrested," as Captain Foulenough is. But if the protagonist attempts to escape his shadow without taking significant moral action, then his incubus only tightens its grip. Paul Pennyfeather never eludes Potts (who becomes Stubbs) and this is because Paul naively continues to study theology on Anglican premises. And the closer Tony Last gets to Eldorado, the more inextricably he spirals into the orbit of the hideous Mr. Todd.

A Handful of Dust is both an Augustinian fable and a psychic quest of the same order as Heart of Darkness. In Conrad's novel (from which Waugh may well have borrowed - there are Eldorado expeditions in both) Marlow grapples subliminally with Kurtz, under whose influence he has fallen, and in "killing" Kurtz, emblematically defeats the evil in himself. In Waugh's novel Tony Last succumbs to Mr. Todd, but he does not die. Mr. Todd nurses Tony back to health and outwits a rescue party sent from England. After all, if Tony dies so will Mr. Todd, for Mr. Todd is Tony's own self-created shadow.

There can be little doubt that the "fear" which pervades Waugh's fiction stems from the "shadows" which, through his life, Waugh saw "striding before" him and "rising to meet" him. At the core of Waugh's writing, perhaps more deeply rooted there than he even knew, is the cry for a penetration to the real self and the demand for personal acceptance of responsibility for the actions of this real self. To evade the self is to live in a fool's paradise. It is, like Tony Last, to seek Eldorado. In Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (London: Chapman and Hall, 1939, p.109), Waugh makes the following important assertion:

Man is by nature an exile, haunted even at the height of his prosperity, by nostalgia for Eden: Individually and collectively he is always in search of an oppressor who will take responsibility for his ills. ... Anything will do so long as he can focus on it his sense of grievance and convince himself that his own inadequacy is due to some exterior cause.

Waugh scrupulously avoids the language of the psychiatrists, whom he said he hated; nevertheless he in effect accuses man of projecting his sense of his own evil outward in order to escape his responsibility for losing "Eden." The compulsion to blame one's sense of personal "inadequacy" on some "external cause" is therefore the force which creates shadows. Projection is convenient: at a stroke man disowns his guilt and makes the causes of his lost spiritual peace physically accessible in the material world. But there are obvious dangers in projection, for the more man wants to be innocent the less attention he pays to the true source of his guilt: himself.

At root, A Handful of Dust is a book about Eden, self-consciousness and self-deception stems from our inability to cope with our self-consciousness. Waugh avoids jargon-terms like "perceiver and perceived" and "ego and object." Nevertheless it is clear that behind the language of his fiction Waugh is fully aware that man's dilemma is to remember Eden, that perfect state of primal unity when the knower and the known were as yet undivided, but to forget that the act of knowing Eden was the act of losing it. Once conscious of what he had lost man was unable to sustain his responsibility, so he projected it. But projections need projectors (Mr. Todd needs Tony Last); therefore as long as man remembers his lost paradise he will be unable to escape the "oppressor who will take responsibility for his ills."

Waugh asserts in A Handful of Dust that the quest for Eden is really the search for the oppressor who makes our concept of Eden possible. Strictly (or clinically), since one is a concept and the other is a projection, both Eldorado and Mr. Todd should retreat as Tony advances. But in the penultimate chapter Waugh takes the interesting step of allowing Tony to overtake picturesque Eldorado - though only in an hallucination. As Tony feverishly stretches out his arms toward this delusive apotheosis of earthly perfection, he steps simultaneously into the clutches of the self he has rejected throughout his life. Waugh's point about Eldorado is not that it does not exist, but that it does not exist as Tony had imagined it. Tony does not fail in his search for a city; indeed he more than succeeds for he achieves the reality behind his delusion: a Camelot which is really a Bleak House. Tony achieves his land of heart's desire: a paradise where he is never at a loss for someone other than himself to blame. Mr. Todd accepts blame with equanimity, for the more blameless Tony is, the more powerful is Mr. Todd. But Tony has been blaming and creating Mr. Todd his whole life long, and he has passed the point of no return.

In the jungle Tony acts out the truth behind his elaborate Victorian ethical code. He finds himself imprisoned in a squalid, appetite-ridden jungle village - but he was equally imprisoned by his illusions in that other jungle, England. He reads Dickens to Mr. Todd - but he had already been posing to himself as a sentimental, humanistic Dickensian character at home. Never much interested in the Word, his appropriate fate is to read words. But Tony never learns his lesson. Even when he is brought face to face with the evil he has attempted to disown, he remains ignorant of his only possible escape route: self-recognition and admission of guilt. Tony remains unaware of Waugh's central message: evil is subjective and responsibility for it must be acknowledged.

In 1946 Waugh described the genesis of A Handful of Dust.(2) It had begun as a short story entitled, "The Man Who liked Dickens." The short story corresponds closely to chapters five and six of A Handful of Dust, with the notable exceptions that Tony is called Henty and Mr. Todd is named Mr. McMaster. In a way the original names are better, for Waugh implies that while we all try to be far-ranging Hentys, we all have our McMasters off in the distance bearing the guilt that we have repudiated. The white man's real burden (see Black Mischief and Scoop) is that no matter how far he travels he is unable to elude his dark counterpart. Indeed, the farther he runs the more likely he is to suffer a disastrous confrontation with this dusky otherself.

The frightening symbiosis of self and shadow which Waugh diagnoses in Tony and Mr. Todd makes A Handful of Dust one of the most unnerving books of the century. It is certainly not a mere "entertainment" about a broken marriage. Nor is it simply an Augustinian allegory. Waugh's dual theme, the futility of trying to elude one's self (Mr. Todd) while trying to physically overtake a concept (Eldorado) places him, all unexpectedly, in the company of the absurdist. At the same time, Waugh's belief in the efficacy of confession provides a way out of the futility and allows us to regard him as a responsible satirist. Through Tony Last's search for a fool's paradise, Waugh reaches to the core of a twentieth-century syndrome: chronic self-evasion through moral and physical escapism. For Tony, as for so many of us, the quest for a citadel of blameless freedom issues paradoxically in a psychic prison. As Helena says in her novel (p. 207), "Slaves like to imagine such cities." If we freely admit our brotherhood with Mr. McMaster then we annihilate him. But if we persist in searching for Eden as if we are still innocent, then Mr. McMaster masters us.

NOTES

I. Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (London: Chapman and Hall, 1934), p. 166. All references to Waugh's works in this paper are to first editions.

2. Evelyn Waugh, "Fan-Fare," Life, 20 (April 8, 1946), p. 58.

MISS VAVASOUR REMEMBERED

J.W. Scheideman (Chicago, Illinois)

A hasty reader could easily pass by the subdued characterization of Miss Vavasour without remembering her. This is the nature of her personality. In Evelyn Waugh's trilogy of World War II, Sword of Honour (Men At Arms, 1952; Officers and Gentlemen,1956; and The End of the Battle, 1962) she is just one of a number of traditional English eccentric types, who either die or fade out from the action as World War II changes the fabric of English society.

With the exception of Miss Vavasour, these enjoyable eccentrics are distinguished by their flamboyant appeal; stage center, they vie for a place in the reader's attention. Colonel "Jumbo" Trotter, "both ponderous and popular," for example, is certainly dramatically memorable. Following the best traditions of the stock retired English colonel, "Jumbo" is larger than life and almost overwhelms wartime conditions by natural strength of character. He holds his own, at least in the early stages of the war. Miss Vavasour, in contrast, is defined by being underplayed - only peering out from the wings at regular intervals. She has been diminished by life. Carefully preserved and faintly smelling of lavender, she almost lives within scrapbook pages. Cliché is appropriate: life has passed her by.

A spinsterish elderly lady, Miss Vavasour primly and fearfully exists in the same seaside resort hotel at Matchet as Guy Crouchback's father. "Jumbo" describes her (p. 296), in the only subjective physical impression, as a "pleasant-looking lady." But no one pays any real attention to her, putting her immediately out of mind. Forgotten and easily forgettable, she is one of the lonely ladies, fading toward death in hotel corridors and sitting rooms. Her responses are predictable and tedious. As the narrator mentions (p. 545) the Cuthberts don't actually go "down on their knees to keep their residents" after the army leaves Matchet. One has to qualify Miss Vavasour's dated words and feelings acted with her isolated Victorian melodrama. Or avoid them; the narrator screens most of her direct dialogue from the text. Even Guy's saintly father tunes her out (p. 283). And good-natured "Jumbo" can understand her only in terms of a rather inappropriate newspaper stereotype of "selfish old women" outside the war effort, not as any sort of sympathetic individual.

A possible source, however, adds depth and interest to her portrayal. Evelyn Waugh's "Miss Vavasour" is in the spelling of her name only differentiated from the "Vavasor" sisters, Alice and Kate, in Anthony Trollope's novel Can You Forgive Her? (1864-65) by the addition of the "u," giving a connotation of "souring." The surname has pertinent meaning. Webster's Dictionary gives vavasor and vavasour as alternate spellings for "a feudal tenant ranking directly below a peer or baron." Geoffrey Chaucer uses the term to describe the Frankeleyn in The Canterbury Tales (Prologue, lines 359-360): "A shirreve hadde he been, and a countour; Was no-wher such a worthy vavasour." In the sense that perfect, idealized, marriage is the theme of the story of Arveragus and Dorigene, The Frankeleyn's Tale would have an ironic relationship to Sword of Honour. However, the philosopher's moral (lines 1606-1612) is essentially that anyone is capable of a "gentil dede" - and this is what Guy Crouchback does in accepting Virginia's child, an act of fidelity and generosity. But perhaps more to the point is Henry James' critical remark about Trollope's Alice Vavasour; "The question is, Can we forgive Miss Vavasor? Of course we can, and forget her too, for that matter."(1)

Could Miss Vavasour, forcing her "chivalrous devotion" (p. 283) on Mr. Crouchback at the Marine Hotel, be a representative forgotten (easily forgettable) genteel lady that one of Trollope's Miss Vavasors might have become? Alice finally married; Kate apparently did not. But any character allusion here would be one of broad surface rather than detailed one-to-one resemblance. As far as I know this would be an illusion that has not previously been noted. Miss Vavasour's chivalrous pretensions are as inappropriate as Guy's, part of Trollope's polite romantic world as Guy's are part of medieval romance.

There are at least three additional specific suggestions of this source relationship in the text. The Duke of Omnium, probably the old Duke, a significant character from Trollope's "Plantagenet Palliser" series (of which Can You Forgive Her? is the first), is mentioned in an enumeration of families beyond the Crouchback pale (p.40), only a very few lines from Miss Vavasour's first introduction. Disdainfully proud, the Duke is the opposite aristocratic character of Mr. Crouchback.(2) The name of the seaside resort, Matchet, has a marked similarity to the favorite home of the Duke of Omnium - Matching Priory, or Matching, which he gave to Plantagenet Palliser as a wedding present. And the strongest proof is Waugh's direct introduction of Trollope's title into the text. While Virginia makes her layette during "The Last Battle" (p. 707): in "a scene of traditional domesticity...," "Uncle Peregrine was reading aloud from Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?"

The choice of this relatively minor Trollope novel is in character for Uncle Peregrine, a wonderful bibliophile and "bore of international repute." Michael Sadleir, in his introduction to the Oxford edition, says it "is awkward, sententious, discordantly episodic, and has a central theme that can only be termed much ado about nothing."(3) Peregrine, though, in his particularly quaint habits of mind (while never commenting on Miss Vavasour) would be conscious of the similarities between Virginia and Alice Vavasor. Both are capricious, and he would probably characterize them as "jilts" - a fairly strong label in its day. The novel's title has an ironic twist in this setting.

Viewing Miss Vavasour in relationship to a source in Trollope expands the implications of her characterization. Virginia is as stylized in her own way as Miss Vavasour is in an opposing life style. Like most other traditional scenes in the trilogy, the cameo of Uncle Peregrine and Virginia at home with Can You Forgive Her? will be blasted away (in this case quite literally in a bomb explosion) by World War II. Virginia is then identified in what amounts to an eulogy by Everard Spruce (pp. 751-752) as a derivation from literary sources: "the last of twenty years' succession of heroines... The ghosts of romance who walked between the two wars." With her source in sentimental Victorian fiction, Miss Vavasour is the earlier model heroine. Ironically, both Virginia and Miss Vavasour can be interpreted as acting the roles of heroines rather than truly living. Waugh, it would seem, intends the two women - on the surface so different from each other - to be compared; but one misses the basis for comparison if Miss Vavasour's own literary derivation is not considered. Which of them is the more "forgivable?" This remains an open question. Perhaps both waste their lives, through of course in opposite ways.

Waugh has however provided an interesting context for these problems by cleverly altering slightly out of focus the moral perspective of Trollope. This occurs in two ways. Alice Vavasor's error, practically nonexistent in terms of today's morality, was easily corrected. She had broken off her engagement with John Grey in order to renew her engagement with the rascally George Vavasor, her cousin; then, realizing the truth about George's character, she returned to John. After she returns to her engagement with the right man and marries him, forgiveness for her indecision becomes a trivial ethical question particularly when drawn out for the reader at such length. Henry James asks: "Since forgiveness was to be brought into the question, why did not Mr. Trollope show us an error that we might really forgive - an error that would move us to indignation?" Waugh does move a decent representative character like Kerstie Kilbannock to indignation with Guy's seemingly unjustified forgiveness of Virginia's offences, involving several divorces and a child out of wedlock. Forgiveness in Virginia's case is a real ethical and, considering the conversation of Eloise Plessington and Angela Box-Bender (pp. 753-754), a theological issue. Referring to Virginia, Eloise says: "She was killed at the one time in her life when she could be sure of heaven - eventually."

Henry James also questions why Trollope didn't let Alice Vavasor's wrong decision have finality so "we might have forgiven her in consideration of the lonely years of repentance in store for her, and of her having been at any rate consistent."(5) Never referred to in any way other than "Miss" Vavasour, this lady is apparently a spinster, and Waugh consistently suggests that she might endure just the "lonely years of repentance" James recommends. The adjective poor attaches itself to her - "poor Miss Vavasour." Considered within the sphere of the probable sources involved, a comparison of Virginia and Miss Vavasour can achieve some depth and complexity, curiously enough along lines similar to those points made by Henry James in his 1865 review criticizing Can You Forgive Her?

Although an ostensibly minor character, Miss Vavasour functions as a touchstone in defining other characters at least three times. There is the somewhat indirect comparison with Virginia, an incisive scene (p. 431) in which Miss Vavasour asks Mr. Crouchback for a newspaper picture of Trimmer so that she can "frame" him (a pithy commentary on Victorian hero worship), and her more significant function in helping to define Guy's father. It is at this latter point that she really connects with the trilogy's major themes.

Miss Vavasour briefly accents the integrity of Guy's father, an exceptionally good person. "He was not at all what is called 'a character,'" is the narrative viewpoint (p.39) of Mr. Crouchback. This is despite a Mr. Chips tendency, in the tradition of elderly classics teachers. An aristocrat of character, anchored with sincere religious conviction, rather than a character, Mr. Crouchback is purposefully distinguished from the trilogy's likeable stock eccentrics in one way by Miss Vavasour. Alone, Mr. Crouchback might seem eccentric; but in juxtaposition with an authentic stock eccentric of little substance, his real conviction and personality emerge by contrast. For example, his consciousness is far beyond the level of the Cuthberts' reoccurring connivance, the narrow focus of Miss Vavasour's fears. And Felix, the gentle "old" golden retriever" represents "a nice manly smell" to Miss Vavasour; while Mr. Crouchback shows naturally loving concern about proper food for his pet. Her reactions stop short on shallow courtesies. Mr. Crouchback penetrates to essential needs and responsibilities.

"Jumbo" likes this elderly gentleman, and since the usual reader likes the Colonel, this attests to Mr. Crouchback's goodness. On a different, more cultured, evaluative level from "Jumbo's" soldierly intuition, Miss Vavasour genteelly describes Mr. Crouchback (p.39) as: "Racé rather than distingué." And she characterizes Guy (p.595) as "Fin de ligne." This key phrase becomes the title of Chapter Nine. At the end of the line herself, and a superficial person, she still has the cultural background to make interesting social commentary. But she just barely misses the mark here, the purpose of her contrasting role. Everyone forgets Miss Vavasour. However through Providence God would seem to remember Mr. Crouchback, and the Crouchback line revives and continues. The strength of Mr. Crouchback's religious conviction and goodness saves him from mere eccentricity, and Guy (whose own spiritual vision is not so acute) follows the spiritual examples set by his father.

In one of the trilogy's most gently pathetic scenes (pp. 609-610), after Mr. Crouchback's funeral Miss Vavasour asks Guy if she might have his father's college tobacco jar so its scent will keep her memory of him alive. In sharp contrast, it is his father's spiritual essence that Guy remembers and prays to for direction. Mr. Crouchback's religious beliefs surpass genteel good form and sentimentality. At the end of Chapter Nine, Guy has made his affirmative decision (p. 699) about Virginia's child, much to the sensible exasperation of Kerstie Kilbannock:

He turned once more to his father's letter: Quantitative judgements don't apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of 'loss of face.'

Guy triumphs over genteel pride in favor of life, wisely lived. This is one of the very few times in the trilogy when the right course of action is also chivalrous. And it is appropriate in this sense, that the chapter title is from "a worthy," if in this instance a somewhat timeworn and unfortunate, "Vavasour."

Due in part ultimately to his acceptance of his father's beliefs (or rather a practice of religious beliefs through his father's example and mediation), Guy survives and is seen at the end of the trilogy with his new family, making a fresh start on the ruins of the past. Traditional stock characters and settings have receded. Miss Vavasour has been distanced into obscurity. With some qualifications Guy's situation farming at the "Lesser House" reminds me of a theme from the ending of Joyce Cary's To Be A Pilgrim (1942):(6) rural vitality overcoming the empty forms that the Miss Vavasours fall prey to.

A sort of female Prufrock, dear Miss V. only "boils" without generating any steam.(7) Missing life, she can only define it by contrast as a little shadowed figure within the novelistic structure, but her part in the total ensemble action of the trilogy is significant. Her characterization deserves to be remembered!

NOTES

Note: All page references in the text are to Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour (Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 1966).

1. The thematic question asked in the title is trivial. James continues: "What does Mr. Trollope mean by this question? It is a good instance of the superficial character of his work that he has been asking it once a month for so long a time without being struck by its flagrant impertinence. What are we to forgive? Alice Vavasor's ultimate acceptance of John Grey makes her temporary ill-treatment of him, viewed as a moral question, a subject for mere drawing room gossip." Henry James, review, Nation (New York), 28 September, 1865, i. 409-410; Reprinted in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, edited by Donald Smalley, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 249-250.

2. The Duke of Omnium is described by Trollope in Doctor Thorne (1858) as: "undistinguished in appearance, except that there was a gleam of pride in his eye which seemed every moment to be saying: "I am the Duke of Omnium." Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne, (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1914), Vol. 1, p. 256.

3. Michael Sadleir, Introduction, Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? Oxford Trollope (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. x.

4. Henry James, op. cit., p. 250.

5. Ibid., p. 250.

6. Joyce Cary, To Be A Pilgrim (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942). pp. 327-328.

7. Miss Carmichael "seethes" with equal ineffectualness (pp. 331-332).

Addendum

By the end of the trilogy both Miss Vavasour and Virginia are forgotten. Elderberry (p. 796) does not remember Virginia's name or her death. The comparison and contrast between these two characters becomes even more interesting, however, because of the existence of a pertinent third "Miss Vavasor/ Vavasour," who bridges Waugh's Miss Vavasour and Virginia, embodying within one characterization the "Miss Vavasour" name with the stylized immorality of the "bright young things" of Virginia's generation. She briefly enters the Lord Peter Wimsey stories, which I only recently started to read.

In Dorothy L. Sayers's Murder Must Advertise (1933) one of the "Embarrassing Entanglements of a Group-manager," Chapter XIII, is a "tough jane" named Ethel Vavasour, subsequently referred to after her introduction almost consistently as Miss Vavasour. She pressures her way into Pym's Publicity in order to attempt to threaten Mr. Tallboy, a married advertising executive who is having an affair with her (Avon Books, paperback edition, 1967, pp. 181-185; and then mentioned on pp. 242, 277, and 280).

There do not seem to be any developed details, beyond the name itself, in this brief characterization that would link her in any depth with Chaucer or Trollope; but speculatively it would still be possible for the role to have influenced Waugh. Miss Sayers was of course a medievalist and plausibly her choice of the name for this character was made with full awareness of its place in The Canterbury Tales. Waugh could possibly have been struck by the apparently intentional ironic conflict of the name with the girl's personality, and then amplified the device by making an explicit connection with Trollope as he created his own Miss Vavasour and Virginia. Admittedly, this is very speculative; but it is at least interesting to note.

EVELYN WAUGH: A SUPPLEMENTARY CHECKLIST OF CRITICISM

Hans Otto Thieme (University of Wuppertal, Germany)

This is a continuation of the earlier checklists, published in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter (EWN), II,i; III,i; IV,i; V,i; VI,i; VII,i; and VIII,ii. It includes books and articles published since 1973, as well as some items omitted from the previous lists.

Blayac, Alain, "The Evelyn Waugh-Dudley Carew Correspondence at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin", EWN, VIII,ii (1974), 1-6.

Boyle, Andrew, "Poor Dear Brendan": The Quest for Brendan Bracken (London: Hutchinson, 1974); reviewed by Paul Johnson: New Statesman (Nov. 1, 1974), 622-623.

Bowen, John, "Literary Debts", TLS (Aug. 4, 1972), 918. (On Waugh's source for "Bella Fleace Gave a Party".)

Bradbury, Malcolm, "Muriel Spark's Fingernails", Critical Quarterly, XIV,iii (1972), 241-250.

Chapman, Robert T., "'Parties ... Parties ... Parties': Some Images of the Gay Twenties", English, XXI (Autumn 1972), 93-97. (Vile Bodies.)

Desarmenien, Jeanne (transl.), "Jean Giraudoux's 'Preface' to the French edition of Waugh's Black Mischief (Grasset, 1938)", EWN, VIII,i (1974), 6-7.

Doherty, James J., "More on the Kingfisher Image in Brideshead", EWN, VIII,iii (1974), 8-9. (Cf. Daniel J. Canney: EWN, VIII,iii (1973) 6-7.)

Duer, Harriet Whitney, "Pinfold's Pinfold", EWN, VIII,i (1974), 3-6.

Gallagher, D.S., "Brideshead Revisited", in Ellis, J.R. (ed.), Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association: Proceedings and Papers of the Thirteenth Congress Held at Monash University 12-18 August 1970 (Melbourne: AULLA and Monash University, 1971), 152-153. (Abstract.)

Gill, Richard, Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972 .

Greene, Donald, "Sir Ralph Brompton - An Identification", EWN, VIII,iii (1974), 1-2.

Heath, Jeffrey M., "Evelyn Waugh and the Comic Macabre", Dissertation Abstracts International, XXXII (1972), 6930 A (Toronto).

Heath, Jeffrey M., "Apthorpe Placatus?", Ariel, V,i (1974), 5-24.

Heath, Jeffrey M., "Vile Bodies: A Revolution in Film Art", EWN, VIII,iii (1974), 2-7.

Heath, Jeffrey M., "Waugh's Decline and Fall in Manuscript", English Studies, LV,vi (1974), 523-530.

Howarth, Herbert, "Voices of the Past in Dickens and Others", University of Toronto Quarterly, XLI,ii (1972), 151-162.

Johnson, J.J., "Counterparts: the Classic and the Modern 'Pervigilium Veneris"', EWN, VIII,iii (1974), 7-8.

Kakigahara, Mie, "Evelyn Waugh no Sakuhin ni miru Kokkeisa no Tokucho", English Language and Literature Studies (Tokyo), VIII (1971), 81-92. (Characteristics of humour in Evelyn Waugh's works.)

LaFrance, Marston, "The Year's Work in Waugh Studies", EWN, VIII,i (1974), 1-3.

Middell, Eike, "Nachbemerkung", in: Tod in Hollywood [German translation of The Loved One] (Berlin, 1973), 117-120.

Newby, Eric, "The Most Unforgettable Character I Never Met", Horizon, XVI, iii ( 1974), 110-111.

Rosten, Leo, "How I Met Evelyn Waugh", Saturday Review/World, II (21 September 1974), 35, and II (5 October 1974), 39.

TLS (13 September 1974),976: "Biffing", and (1 November 1974),1228: "A Farewell to Biffing". (On the eleven-part B.B.C. adaptation of Sword of Honour.)

Waugh, Alec, "Memories", Atlantic, 233 (April 1974), 36. (W. refers to Claud Cockburn's article in Atlantic, 232 December 1973, 53-59.)

Wilson, B. W., "Sword of Honour: The Last Crusade", English, XXIII (1974), 87-93.

Wyss, Kurt O., "Pikareske Thematik im Romanwerk Evelyn Waughs", Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten, 77 (Bern: Franke, 1973).

A POSTCARD FROM EVELYN WAUGH

Richard Gill (Pace University)

Since Waugh employed the English country house as a symbolic setting in a number of his novels, it might be assumed that he had actual places in mind as prototypes for those he described so lavishly. To make certain, while I was preparing a study of the country house as a recurring theme in modern fiction, later published as Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, 1972), I wrote to Waugh, in 1964, to ask if he had any historic houses in mind as models for Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust and Brideshead, and to invite his comments on the general theme. I also asked him to expand upon what he had called "the present cult of the English country house," in his preface to the revised edition of Brideshead Revisited - a "cult" which Waugh himself might appear to have fostered.

Knowing his reluctance to respond to any such inquiries, I was surprised that he replied at all, but he did - on a postcard and with a terseness that seemed to allow expression of impatience without compromising good manners. Brief as it is, his reply was informative enough to preclude idle speculation about the points of the inquiry, and I reproduce it here in full for other students of Waugh. The postcard has Waugh's address printed at the top (here italicized); the message is in Waugh's own handwriting.

From Mr. E. Waugh, Combe Florey House, Nr. Taunton

Thank you for your inquiry of 10th August. In answer: no houses served as models for Hetton or Brideshead. I have no comment to make on the recurrence of the country house in so many novels. It was a feature of English life. By 'newly developed cult' I meant that large parties of tourists are now admitted to country houses.

E.W. 19 August 64

Pace University,
New York City

THE WHITSTON WAUGH CHECKLIST: ERRATA AND ADDENDA IV

Winnifred M. Bogaards

C. Contributions to Periodicals

1. Fiction

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.