Tag: Evelyn Waugh

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Constance Marten and Mark Gordon.

A recent British criminal case involving a white English aristocrat, her black rapist lover, and their neglectfully dead mixed-race baby, seems almost designed to carry a certain literary significance to it. The aristo involved led one of those lives you usually only see in novels, whereby the main character’s lifespan and fate is meant to stand in for the lifespan and fate of something far wider, like an entire nation, class, or civilization. (more…)

Robert N. Taylor, Moon Mistress

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I love reading Margot Metroland’s essays and I love when she helps me to remember the various writers and forgotten figures of the American underground of the past. Margot has undoubtedly led a very interesting life and has known many personalities, artists, and interesting people. Judging by her writing, I’d say she’s both smart and sociable, which is a very interesting combination, and at the same time she has an interest in strange things. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2. Part 1 here.

Partings II – Watts and The Church Today: Real Presence or Real Estate?

Watts was quite successful in his attempt to express the religio perennis in the language of Christian theology; not just in my opinion today, but among his Episcopal peers at the time (one bishop even called it “the most important book on religion in this century”[1]), (more…)

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Part 1 of 2

Alan W. Watts
Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion
New York: Pantheon, 1947; reissued with a new Preface, 1971
Kindle, 2016

“For God is not niggardly in his self-revelation; he exposes himself right before our eyes.” — Alan Watts (more…)

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Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is probably best known today for Brideshead Revisited, his 1945 novel of fin-de-siècle longing and Catholic apologetics that has received both television and cinematic adaptations. He made his fame in the 1930s, however, by penning some of the most biting, satirical novels of the British upper class and its various hangers-on. Waugh was brutally honest about the inferiority of the Negro race and its incompatibility with Western civilization. (more…)

Whittaker Chambers, underground man.

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(Written in the style, if not quite the spirit, of senior TIMEditor Chambers’ weekly newsmagazine.)

Rumpled, paunchy Whittaker Chambers (April 1, 1901-July 9, 1961) has long merited haughty sneers and raised eyebrows on America’s nationalist Right. Reasons: his shifting ideologies, his inscrutable motives.

Among the most compelling critiques of Chambers we may count those of Classics professor Revilo P. Oliver. (more…)

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Henry Williamson

Today is the birthday of Henry Williamson (Dec. 1, 1895 – Aug. 13, 1977)—ruralist author, war historian, journalist, farmer, and visionary of British fascism.

Two rather incongruous points of Williamson’s life stand out. One is that he achieved fame with what is usually regarded as a children’s book, Tarka the Otter (originally published 1927, with a movie version in 1979).

The other is that he was a friend of Lawrence of Arabia; and that it was on his way back from posting a letter to Williamson that T. E. Lawrence was mysteriously killed in a motorcycle accident. (more…)

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The Loved One (1965) is my all-time favorite comedy. Based on a 1948 novel of the same name by Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One stands alongside Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (the book and the movie) as a savagely on-target, dark comic satire on American Protestant civilization.

Both Waugh and O’Connor, of course, were Catholic. (more…)

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“So check it out, and next time you go cruising down the street, take a look around. We are Franklin Franklin.” — Jeff Frankas

After reading Jeff Frankas’ excellent review of Small Apartments[1] I did what I usually do in such circumstances–head over to Amazon to see if there are any used copies in the $0.25 range (my current book budget). Once there, I discovered that it has already been made into a movie, a veritable “underground hit” with big stars like . . . Billy Crystal.  (more…)

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Owen Wister
Philosophy 4: A Story of Harvard University
New York: Macmillan, 1903

Kindle annotated edition by Daniel P. B. Smith, with original illustrations, 2012. Online web version here.

“When you call me that, smile.” — Owen Wister, The Virginian  (more…)