October 2011
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Fridays at 4:00: Full of sound and fury →
smithhousetea:
I’m also thoroughly enjoying my Evelyn Waugh seminar, even though the reading load is only barely manageable. Never mind that, though, we had a great discussion about Vile Bodies on Tuesday. Doug Patey constantly brings up connections between the novels and Waugh’s life—he did write a biography of Waugh, after all—which has been very illuminating, especially since very few...
September 2011
48 posts
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“Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of...”
– Evelyn Waugh, responding to Graham Greene saying that reporters misquoted him as saying that Americans were cowards, February 1952 (via chekhonte)
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When Auberon Waugh was kicked out of Oxford university, his father advised that there were only two possible careers for him: “You must become either a schoolmaster or a spy.” But young Waugh’s application to join British Intelligence was sabotaged by one of the people he had cited as a referee, who told MI6 that “I wouldn’t even employ Auberon Waugh as my...
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“Re: Suicide. Has it ever occurred to you that bastards are much more inclined to...”
– Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford, 16 November 1949 (via chekhonte)
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“[Nineteen Eighty-Four] failed to make my flesh creep as presumably you intended....”
– Evelyn Waugh to George Orwell, 17 July 1949 (via chekhonte)
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Evelyn Waugh was on to something
[…]
And make no mistake: Waugh thought the Church had a made a wrong turn at the Second Vatican Council.
In his correspondence and writings in the Catholic press, Waugh was most disturbed about the Council’s plans for liturgical reform. The reformers, he complained, were “a strange alliance between archeologists absorbed in their speculations on the rites of the second century, and...
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“Death is not certain; blindness & baldness are. Still it will save you from...”
– Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford, 5 January 1946 (via chekhonte)
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“Miss Smith is a fair treat …. She will become famous.”
– Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited (on seeing Maggie’s performances in The Private Ear and The Public Eye)
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World Books Broadsheet, Dec. 1948
EW society news:
Correspondent Roger Osborn has sent the EWS scans in PDF format of a two-sided flier he found laid in a secondhand copy of When the Going Was Good, published by World Books, The Reprint Society, London, in December 1948. The flier is that month’s edition of Broadsheet, the bulletin of World Books.
The verso page contains the material of interest to Waugh enthusiasts: a...
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“Dear Miss Bourne:
Thank you for sending me Catch-22. I am sorry that the book...”
– Evelyn Waugh on his pre-publication copy of Catch-22
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“Evelyn Waugh’s Noonday Reviver
1 hefty shot of gin
1 (1/2 pint) bottle...”
– Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (2008)
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Even more Hastings!
With Meg gone, all pleasure in life evaporated, and Evelyn fell into deep melancholy. Not yet sixty, he felt eighty; he was enfeebled by senile infirmities and talked openly of his wish to die. Most of the day was spent indoors reading and writing letters, every evening doing The Times crossword with Laura. It was a gloomy period for her, her husband’s unhappiness weighing heavy on the...
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Another quote from Selina Hastings's bio
The collapse of talks left the Waughs free to enjoy themselves, with MGM’s hospitality continuing ‘consistently munificent’. ‘Social life gay & refined’, Evelyn reported to Peters. ‘Not as generally described.’ Laura in her expensive new clothes ‘grew smarter and younger and more popular daily and was serenely happy. I was well content and, as...
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More Hastings
Christopher Sykes in his biography recorded some of Evelyn’s most coloratura performances [supposedly in 1956]. Over lunch at Wilton’s one day with Sykes and both Waughs present an argument began between man and wife. Laura had a watch in her handbag which she wanted Evelyn to put in his waistcoat pocket.
He refused. She protested. ‘It’s such a bore in my bag… All...
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The only unmusical member of a musical family
As head of the household, Mary Herbert, looking like the Monarch of the Glen, ruled her domain with absolute authority. In the evenings before dinner she stood in front of the fire with her glass of gin and her cigarette, pushing back her tangled hair and demanding, ‘What? What?’ when, as often, she could not quite hear what was being said. (She was nicknamed ‘Mrs...
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FIASCO IN THE ARCTIC, by Evelyn Waugh
From “The First Time I…”, edited and illustrated by the Hon. Theodora Benson, published by Chapman & Hall in 1935.
As soon as we crossed the Arctic circle, it grew warmer. The sun streamed through the porthole all night, making sleep difficult. At Svalbad they were selling ice-cream on the quay. At Tromso, where we disembarked, it was hotter than at any place where we had...
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“Reminiscences: Randolph [Churchill] reading the Bible for the first time: ‘My...”
– Evelyn Waugh’s diary, 1961 (via onthepermafrost)
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“Were I tempted to believe in the transmigration of souls, I should find support...”
– Evelyn Waugh’s diary, March 1962 (via onthepermafrost)
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Yes, we have no bananas
October 28, 2003
Bourgeois views of the upper class … Evelyn Waugh with his wife, Laura, in Somerset.
One hundred years after Evelyn Waugh’s birth, Michael Davie reveals that the novelist stole fruit from the mouths of his babes. And a lot more.
It is a century today since the novelist Evelyn Waugh was born in less grand circumstances than he would have wished and 37 years since...
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“[A] few doors down from the butcher’s shop where Dad worked there was a little...”
– Alan Bennett (via daringescapes)
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Castle Howard celebrates 30th anniversary of TV...
On September 25th, Castle Howard, the magnificent baroque mansion in Yorkshire used as a location for the 1981 Granada Television series Brideshead Revisited, is marking the 30th anniversary of the production with a special, day-long celebration, Brideshead Revisited 30th Anniversary Day. “The day will include outdoor location tours, a special talk on the filming of Brideshead by Castle...
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BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS ART EXHIBIT::Not A Gallery from D’s EyeZ Productions on Vimeo.
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“At Portofino,” wrote Selina Hastings, one of Evelyn Waugh’s biographers, the...”
– Victor Mallet is the FT’s Madrid bureau chief and sailing correspondent
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“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally...”
– Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)
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“He [Evelyn Waugh] saw Laura now and then on weekends [in 1942 when EW was still...”
– Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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“During the fighting in Crete, a Commando officer named Pedder was shot in...”
– Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter
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Another officer, the Hon. ‘Jakie’ Astor, who was in camp in Dorset with Waugh, told Sykes that he hated to see Waugh drilling his men, or assuming any kind of command over them, however trivial: ‘He never hesitated to take advantage of the fact that while he was a highly educated man, most of them were barely literate. He bullied them in a way they were unused to. He bewildered...
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"Brideshead Revisited" mini-series to be relaesed... →
Out Nov 1 in the US.
