A review of the preceding week’s online press and blogs turns up several references to Evelyn Waugh. The New York Public Library’s blog contains a short article on the occasion of Waugh birthday, recounting the origins of The Loved One:
With a caustic remark for every occasion, he seemed, like Dorothy Parker, to begin every morning by brushing his teeth and sharpening his tongue…Waughâs LA novel mocked Americans as vacuous, uncultured saps, easy marks for the nearest British expat. Its ending is classic Waugh dark comedy, doubtless the reason why Waugh called it his âmost offensive work.â He anticipated a harsh backlash upon publication, telling Randolph Churchill (son of Winston), âGive my love to any friends you see in USA. There will be none after the publication of The Loved One.” Â He also asked his agent to avoid publishing the book in communist countries, fearing it would be used as anti-American propaganda. (Footnotes omitted)
Two papers commented on Waugh’s attitude to the press. The Baltimore Sun quoted at length from Scoop a conversation between Lord Copper and Mr Salter in an article entitled “Some Personality Types are Eternal.” The Observer (NY) quotes Waugh in the context of the recent revival of the Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play The Front Page:
Evelyn Waugh, of all people, once described The Front Page as a barely intelligible story about newspaper life where neurotic men in shirtsleeves and eyeshades rushed from telephone to tape machine, insulting and betraying one another in surroundings of unredeemed squalor. The description still fits.
The Guardian in its ongoing selection of the best 100 works of nonfiction, this week chose Robert Byron’s 1937 travel book The Road to Oxiana. Waugh’s assessment of the book and its author are cited in support of its selection:
According to Robert Byronâs Oxford contemporary Evelyn Waugh â never the most reliable witness â the future author of The Road to Oxiana used to delight in shouting âDown with abroadâ…An enthusiastic literary critical response ranged from Graham Greene, who admired Byronâs demotic, conversational brilliance, to the rivalrous Evelyn Waugh, who had to concede the bookâs high spirits, via the Sunday Times, which linked Byron to his namesake (no relation) and declared him âthe last and finest fruit of the insolent humanism of the 18th centuryâ. Today, widely considered to be Byronâs masterpiece, The Road to Oxiana stands as perhaps the greatest travel book of the 20th century.
Waugh reviewed the book in the Spectator and the review is reprinted in his Essays, Articles and Reviews (p. 197). The quote must come from a review in the Sunday Times by some one else.Â
Finally, in what may be one of the most original assessments of Philip Eade’s recent biography of Waugh, a blogger on Movie Nation has proposed that it be made into the next big TV series to fill the gap left by the termination of Downton Abbey:
Heâd make the great subject for a serial autobiography, weaving in and out of the history of WWI boysâ schools to fascist sympathizer/bigot/anti-Semite to WWII âheroâ to Great Man of British Letters. I envision a âMan Who Came to Dinnerâ take, with say Eddie Marsan or David Wenham â nobody too pretty, mind you. None of this McAvoy or Garfield casting. Maybe Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne or Ben Whishaw. Skewering, flirting, shocking and mocking. Waugh is a natural for a mini series. All his life experiences leading up to his âmasterpiece,â âBrideshead,â which captures class, Catholicism, homo/bisexuality and WWII officer corps heroics in one tale.