NUTS OF HONOUR
ONE
I believe Evelyn Waugh added prefaces to his novels in Combe Florey, as previously mentioned, as and when he was told that Chapman and Hall was running low on hardback copies of a particular title. However, in 1964 Waugh took the initiative when he announced to his agent (A.D. Peters) that he intended to read through Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender with a view to making a single book called Sword of Honour. He heard back from Peters to the effect that both Chapman and Hall (his UK publisher) and Little Brown (his publisher in the U.S.) wanted this but were in no hurry for it.
On July 6, 1964, Waugh wrote from Combe Florey: 'I have finished the job and had it typed. It will make a big book, some 230,000 words though I have abridged the originals considerably.' He also came up with a preface for Sword of Honour, which tells us: 'Repetitions and discrepancies occurred, which I hope are here excised. I have also removed passages which, on re-reading, appeared tedious.'
In the July letter he asks if the typescripts should be sent to Peters, or held at Combe Florey until the publishers were ready for them. Waugh states his awareness that Chapman and Hall have not sold out of all their Unconditional Surrender. Of course, Waugh knew that Chapman and Hall would want to sell these remaining copies before printing a book that would render them somewhat redundant.
A couple of weeks later, Waugh wrote to John Montgomery (at A.D. Peters) wondering if Chapman and Hall had fixed a date for the publication of A Little Learning. He also tells Montgomery that he wants a single volume library edition of the three war books to appear as soon as the publishers think it feasible.
By the end of August, Waugh wrote to Gillon Aitken, his editor at Chapman and Hall, stating that it had been a mistake to allow Penguin to publish Unconditional Surrender before the hardback first edition had sold out. Implying that the Chapman and Hall edition was now selling very slowly. But Waugh could be patient. He simply tells Aitken that the 'omnibus' is ready for him whenever he wants it.
Waugh then posts the typescript (to Gillon Aitken at Chapman and Hall) at the end of September, 1964. Then a month later he tells Aitken about a single correction. He gives the page and line number. It's a few sentences about a medal that Guy's father had given him.
That's it until nearly a year later, end of July, 1965. In the intervening period A Little Learning has been published and in many a letter to the publisher, agent and to friends, Waugh complains about the number of errors. Some he recognises are his fault, and some are the fault of the proofreading at Chapman and Hall.
So that perhaps explains why the letter of July 29, 1965, is at pains to be precise. It's a long letter which begins by saying that he'd sent some corrections for Sword of Honour the day before and here were some more.
'P.262, 1. 11 "nuts" (plural) is a joke of Spotty's. In certain circles it is used, I believe, for testicles. It should of course be "nut" (singular) as in the first edition.'
I should explain that 'Spotty' is Waugh's regularly used nickname for an employee at Chapman and Hall. I don't think he means John MacDougall who ran the publishing company, but I can't be sure. Not yet anyway
I have my own hardback copy of Sword of Honour, a 1984 edition. On the said page 262, the sentence in question reads: 'All round the bum-boats floated selling fruit and nuts.'
Please note up front, dear reader, that the correction never does get made, despite all that follows.
By 'the first edition' Waugh means of Men at Arms. But when that is consulted, the sentence under scrutiny reads, as above: 'All round the bum-boats floated selling fruit and nuts.'
So back to Waugh's letter of July 29 1965. He wants to know if the nuts correction plus one other could go on an erratum slip. Then he says:
'The really important correction, because a key passage is mangled, is the one I first pointed out.'
He means about the medal.
Then Evelyn says that he would like to make a 'literary emendation' on page 261 (the recto of page 262 which he's already correcting). He explains what should come out and what should go in. Part of the passage should read: "I'll do more than that, Dunn, I'll give you a coco-nut. Glass has the charge of it." Dunn looked puzzled. "No shortage of coco-nuts here," he said, "It's nine bob Apthorpe owes." "This is a very special nut. The trophy of a battle I've lost interest in."
One wonders why Waugh thinks coco-nut and coco-nuts should be hyphenated. But let's leave that aside. The coconut that Glass is talking about is a human head that Ritchie-Hook had lopped off a guard during a commando raid.
Waugh ends by saying: 'Perhaps this is rather a lot for an errata slip. Anyway, will you insert it in stock copy. I hope Spotty hasn't done his usual thing of printing five years supply at once. If so, how much would it cost to have pages 261, 262 reprinted and tipped in? That would include the indecent "nuts".
Waugh finished by saying that if the cost of reprinting that single leaf and tipping in were not exorbitant he would meet it himself.
So how did this letter go down at Chapman and Hall? Well I can only guess. Gillon Aitken, in receipt of the letter, may have taken it along to his colleague's office. And then the fun began.
Spotty (arms wide apart, shaking his backside) : "NUTS. Whole hazelnuts. Hoo!!!!!!!! Cadbury's take 'em and they cover them in chocolate!"
TWO
As he said, Waugh cut many passages from the three novels when editing down to Sword of Honour. For instance he removed eleven consecutive lines mentioning Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter from the 'Apthorpe Immolatus' section of Men at Arms.
But a vital change was made to the very last page of the trilogy. Upon the publication of Unconditional Surrender in 1961, Tony Powell had commented in a letter to Evelyn of October 1961 that he found it confusing that Guy Crouchback went on to have two children with his second wife, Domenica. This all but obscured the fact that Gervase (the son of Virginia, Guy's first wife, and Trimmer) who Guy had adopted in an act of selfless goodness, would inherit his estate.
Waugh replied: 'I am disconcerted to find I have given the general impression of a 'happy ending'. This was far from my intention. The mistake was allowing Guy legitimate offspring. They shall be deleted in any subsequent edition. I thought it more ironical that there should be real heirs dispossessed by Trimmer but I plainly failed to make that clear. So no nippers for Guy and Domenica in Penguin.'
The first Penguin edition came out in 1964. 
This has the same ending as the one that Anthony Powell had quibbled about in the Chapman and Hall edition. This is how it reads:
'"Now they've two boys of their own. When Domenica isn't having babies she manages the home farm at Broome. They've settled in the agent's house. They aren't at all badly off. Angela's uncle Peregrine left his little bit to the child. Wasn't such a little bit either.'"
Waugh was fairly philosophical about this error. In letters to his agent and his publisher in 1964 he notes that Penguin have used the wrong version of Unconditional Surrender. Did Penguin correct the error in subsequent editions when Waugh was no longer around? Nope. The 1970s version with the stylish Bentley cover and the 2000 edition in larger format continue to use the uncorrected text.
So I turned to my copies of Sword of Honour, of which I have three, as shown below. 
A Penguin Classic which came out in 1984. A Folio Society edition which appeared in 1993 and a Book Club Associate edition of 1984, which is based on the Chapman and Hall edition of 1965, same cover and page numbers. Only the latter has the amended ending, which reads:
'"Domenica manages the home farm at Broome. They've settled in the agent's house. Pity they haven't any children of their own. They aren't at all badly off. Angela's Uncle Peregrine left his little bit to the child. Wasn't such a little bit either.'"
It's particularly frustrating that the Folio Society book, which is in many ways a deluxe edition, should be flawed in this way. It may be set in Baskerville with Trooper display by Fakenham Photostatting Limited. It may be printed in Great Britain at the Bath Press Avon on Hamilton Wove paper with illustrations printed on Fineblade Smooth Cartridge. It may be bound at the Bath Press in full cloth printed with design by John Lawrence. But it isn't as the author had carefully revised it.
What is Major Ludovic saying to his little lapdog on the cover of the Folio Society's Unconditional Surrender?
He may be saying: "Nuts! Whole hazelnuts! Ooh!!! Cadbury's take 'em and they cover them in chocolate."
Incidentally, there is a line in an Evelyn Waugh letter of 27 March 1962, to Nancy Mitford, which reads 'I think Tony Powell suffers frightfully from all human contact…there is an affinity between him and Henry Yorke which, no doubt, the Cambridge School of Literature will eventually investigate.'
Perhaps Waugh meant me, and this is the investigation. It strikes this writer that Henry Yorke made a very observant point about A Handful of Dust (cut out the Dickens fantasy) just as Anthony Powell did about Unconditional Surrender (ditch the legitimate offspring).
THREE
I've been thinking.
Rescinding the three novels into one omnibus edition was the last bit of sustained work Evelyn Waugh ever did. It's a pity that it was almost universally ignored.
In the end the contents page looked like this:
This looks a lot different to the contents pages of Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender in particular. Do you recognise this contents page, dear reader, or have you too just read the original, uncorrected versions?
Let's think this through from Penguin's perspective. They had already set up and printed Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen. They wouldn't want to go to the expense of resetting either of these books, because small changes go right through the text, so that's what would have been involved. And they may have deliberately used the wrong proofs when doing Unconditional Surrender, because Waugh had only revised the text for the Sword of Honour omnibus. There was no separate contents page in existence, for example. Much easier just to use the Chapman and Hall first edition.
The same argument lets The Folio Press off the hook as well. They wanted to publish a box of three books, so it was much easier for them to use the novels as originally written than the 1964 revision, even though Evelyn Waugh expressly stated that he was producing authorised, revised texts of each of the three books as well as the omnibus edition. Hence his note that Penguin had used the wrong proofs for setting up the paperback version of Unconditional Surrender.
All we can say is that Chapman and Hall got it right when it came to the Sword of Honour omnibus edition. Credit where credit is due.
Except for that one quibble. It still reads 'nuts' on page 262.
Let's drop in on Gillon Aitken and Spotty one more time. We find them together in the conservatory of Chapman and Hall on Henrietta Street, London
Aitken: "I'm going to read out each version and you're going to tell me which seems right."
Spotty: "Roger."
Aitken: "I'll give a little context. Ritchie-Hook and Apthorpe have both been killed in tragi-comic circumstances. Waugh writes… They took Ritchie-Hook out of the hospital before Apthorpe. Guy had half an hour to wait on the quay. The flying-boat lay out. All round the bum-boats floated selling fruit and nuts… How did that sound?"
Spotty: "Hit me with the alternative version."
Aitken: "OK…They took Ritchie-Hook out of the hospital before Apthorpe. Guy had half an hour to wait on the quay. The flying-boat lay out. All round the bum-boats floated selling fruit and nut."
Spotty: "What's a bum-boat?"
Aitken: "I was beginning to wonder that myself."
Spotty: "Bum-boat… bum-boat… bum-boat…? I don't think we can make a definitive decision until we know what a bum-boat is. After all, that's where the 'fruit and nut' or 'fruit and nuts' was to be found."
Aitken: "Let me look it up… A bumboat (no hyphen!) is a small vessel, often a kind of water taxi, used to ferry goods and supplies to ships that are anchored or moored away from the shore."
Spotty: "I see. That makes sense."
Aitken: "By the way, what is that you're eating?"
Spotty: "A bar of Fruit and Nut. Would you like a bit?"
Aitken: "Don't you think it might impact on our thinking about this delicate linguistic point?"
Spotty: "Not really. But what I am thinking is that if we go for 'nut' rather than 'nuts' we should change it from fruit and nuts to Fruit and Nut. Evelyn is as bad about capitals as he is about hyphens. "
Aitken: "Hang on! - I think we're at cross purposes here. I thought you were joking before. You can't possibly think that Evelyn means it should read Fruit and Nut. Why would native boats off the West coast of Africa during the Second World War have stocks of bars of chocolate, a commodity that was strictly rationed in England where Cadbury's make the bloody stuff? The choice is between the options 'fruit and nuts' and the alternative 'fruit and nut'. Strictly speaking, there are two other options, 'fruits and nuts' and 'fruits and nut' but I think we can discard these."
Spotty: "Forgive me. I was getting carried away. It's lovely stuff. Are you sure you don't want a bit?"
Later…
Spotty: "Two grown men on a bumboat. One says to the other: "Nuts. Whole hazelnuts. Ooh!" Cadbury's take 'em and they cover them in chocolate."
Aitken wants to say something but he can't stop laughing long enough to do so.
Later…
Spotty: "So it's nuts then?"
And they both burst out laughing one last time.
A few days later and the conservatory is empty. However, there is a letter written on Combe Florey headed notepaper that is lying on the floor. It was written four days after the letter that had caused so much constructive debate in the offices of Chapman and Hall. The footprints of two different styles of shoe can be made out upon it. However, when dusted down and straightened, the sheet can be read just as easily as any other letter. It was written in the last year of Evelyn's life. An attempt to keep the demons away, or at least at arms length? 
Evelyn never had any intention of going gently into 'that good night'. He always intended to rage against the dying of his own light.
Next essay.
