The current issue of The Cricket Monthly includes a major article about Waugh’s school friend Dudley Carew. See earlier post. This article, by Gideon Haigh, has particular reference to Carew’s career as a reporter on cricket for The Times and his 1936 cricket-themed novel The Son of Grief but also mentions his friendship with Waugh:
…Carew could claim a certain distinction from being Waugh’s first disciple. He was awed by Waugh’s intelligence and poise; he was shocked and intrigued, as a clergyman’s son, by Waugh’s nonchalant atheism. They were successive editors of the Lancing magazine, and members of various world-weary student societies – the Dilettanti, the Corpse Club, the Bored Stiff Club. They holidayed with one another’s families, Carew revealing in his memoirs that one remark in The Son of Grief – “If a man knows the Bible, Shakespeare and Wisden, he won’t go far wrong” – was a dictum of Waugh’s father.
After a fairly detailed summary of Carew’s novel and citations of several other books, the portion of the article dealing with Carew concludes:
…His association with Waugh ended acrimoniously, when he took exception to the novelist’s description of him in A Little Learning (1964) as “a boy in another house” whom he had “fascinated and dominated”. Always modest about his talents (“I place myself in the second league of mediocrity, just above B, just below A”), Carew resented Waugh’s modesty on his behalf, sold his sizeable cache of Waugh’s correspondence to the University of Texas, and wrote a piqued memoir entitled A Fragment of Friendship (1974) – which proved, perhaps gallingly, his most successful book. He enjoyed, at least, one distinction Waugh did not: an obituary, five lines, in Wisden, page 1195 of the 1982 edition.
