–The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about the “co-authored novel”. This is written by Drew Turney and opens with this:
Evelyn Waugh is credited with saying “I never can understand how two men can write a book together. To me, that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.” Tom Clancy called co-writing “the ultimate unnatural act”. Real literature, we’re told, is born from solitary genius.
But co-writing has a home in almost every other form of artistic writing, and we’re seeing it increasingly in fiction. Is the archetype of literary talent – hunched over a typewriter, chain-smoking and wringing prose out of blood, sweat and tears like Ginsburg, Woolf or Burroughs – still worth defending?…
See copy at this link.
–Taki Theodoracopulos writing in The American Conservative discusses “The End of the War Hero Novel”. After noting the primary American writers of this genre (Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, and James Jones), he moves to what he sees as the only British example, Evelyn Waugh and his war trilogy Sword of Honour:
… Separating the writer from the writing is important. As a person [Waugh] was a grumpy, drunken, social climber, a practicing homosexual who had seven children by his second wife, a brave soldier and a vicious gossiper, who wrote the most exquisite pared-down prose. Go figure, as they say. The nice man theory of literary merit is nonexistent. In our emotional era of cancelling and shouting down anyone that offends us, Waugh would have been a goner, along with his work. Waugh senior’s books were a delight. Brideshead Revisited, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Decline and Fall, Black Mischief, Scoop and others were full of characters shown with clarity and elegance in all their absurdities. Yet Waugh’s predilection for grotesque rudeness and condescension to anyone below his social status, especially any foreigner, was what betrayed Waugh’s insecurity of having been born not of the upper classes. He was the most awful of men and the most delightful of writers…
A full copy is available here.
—The Spectator has an article entitled “Brutalism is beautiful” in which Sebastian Milbank defends the style. The article opens with this:
Is a concrete Brutalist complex as worthy of commemoration and preservation as a medieval cathedral or neoclassical stately home? The decision to grant London’s Southbank Centre Grade II listed status last month is an issue on which tweedy conservationists and iconoclastic modernists trade places for the day. Tories reach for the dynamite. Lefties plead that tradition must be protected. But who is right? And why is Brutalism so divisive?
Even those who hate Brutalist buildings must concede that it’s a form of architecture that is arresting and hard to ignore. The Southbank site has long been a cultural flashpoint. Its origins go back to the post-war Festival of Britain, whose 75th anniversary falls in May. Though often given a nostalgic tinge now, the Festival was widely loathed by many conservatives like Evelyn Waugh, who sneered at its “monstrous constructions”…
