–A religious journal in Australia has posted an article marking the 60th anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s death. This is by Michael Cook in The Catholic Weekly. Here’s an excerpt:
…Waugh’s novels of the 20s and 30s portrayed the lives of papier-mâché characters who stumble on without the slightest awareness of their dignity as children of God or even simple human integrity. The side-splitting absurdity of the lives in Decline and Fall, Scoop, or A Handful of Dust provokes one to ask, isn’t there anything more?
In the 40s, Waugh wrote novels which replied, Yes, there is.
Brideshead Revisited is the finest example of this – the story of how God’s grace finally blesses the tormented lives of a dysfunctional upper-class English family. He allows them to stray into failed marriages or despair or hyper-religious righteousness – and then gives “a twitch upon the thread” to draw them back to Himself…
—The Independent newspaper has a story by Sam Kiley about the Mandelson security clearance affair that concludes with this quote from Waugh’s novel about journalists:
…It was also a failure of the civil service not to have highlighted the dangers that Mandelson posed. If necessary at the risk of losing their own careers and pensions. That’s what we ask of soldiers, but when they pay a price it’s with their lives not their stipends.
Where were the officers of the government, of the security services, of the foreign office when Mandelson was being briefed on top secret matters even before his nod-through clearance was given? They were in the room, telling him stuff he had no right to be hearing.
In Evelyn Waugh’s satire of journalism, preparations for war in Aden were reported to be inadequate and, in the truncated language of telegrams, “unwarwise”.
This week Britain has been shown to be the same “unwarwise” but Scoop was fiction – the threats facing Britain are real.
–The London Review of Books has an article by Charles Glass in which he compares today’s crisis in the Middle East with one that he covered in 1975 when he was reporting from Beirut. He is also reminded of Scoop:
…This was the era of the journalistic raconteur, satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop forty years earlier, whose favoured sagas involved the finagling of expenses. A Newsweek colleague of mine used to say: ‘I love doing expenses. It’s the only chance I get to write fiction.’ My favourite tale, which I recall hearing from Donald Wise, a courtly former Suffolk Regiment officer who became a correspondent for the Daily Express and later the Daily Mirror, involved a British reporter in Cairo during the brief lifetime of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria. The reporter was submitting countless receipts for lunches and dinners with a valued source, ‘Syrian diplomat Marwan Badawi’. As the cost of entertaining Mr Badawi exceeded even Fleet Street’s generous limits, a bookkeeper in London cabled Cairo: ‘No Badawi listed on Syrian diplomatic register. Please explain.’ The correspondent fired back: ‘Man must be an imposter. Will never deal with him again.’…
—The Miami Student (a newspaper based in Southern Ohio) carries a story in which Molly Fahy encourages her fellow students to read classic novels. Here is one of her five recommendations:
“Brideshead Revisited” — Evelyn Waugh
Did anyone else hate reading “The Great Gatsby?”
Even if you didn’t, which is so unbelievably bizarre to me, I think you’ll enjoy “Brideshead Revisited” a whole lot more.
Set at the start of the 1920’s in England, “Brideshead Revisited” follows middle-class Charles Ryder as he becomes friends with Lord Sebastian Flyte. The two go on a series of misadventures at university and become increasingly closer to each other. Charles eventually meets Sebastian’s eccentric family, who are the only Catholic-English nobility.
As Sebastian falls deeper and deeper into alcoholism, Charles becomes infatuated with Sebastian’s twin sister Julia, and eventually, the allure of riches leads to life-changing consequences.
It’s a far better critique of greed, with more likable characters than “The Great Gatsby,” and will keep you turning the pages to find out how the drama unfolds.
