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“Evelyn Waugh: The Permanent Adolescent”

Hitchens' biographical and critical review of Evelyn Waugh and his work. Hitchens gives a very balanced critique of Waugh’s work, but in the end, clearly leaves us with the understanding that he believes Waugh to be one of the greatest English writers. Hitchen’s comment that “…to state the obvious: that Waugh wrote as brilliantly as he did precisely because he loathed the modern world,” lays out clearly his thesis that Waugh was a staunch cultural and political conservative in a time of great change between the wars. Hitchen’s quote from The Ordeal of Gilbert about Pinfold sums it up, “…his strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz— everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.”

May want to read Sword of Honour after hearing Hitchens rave, “Waugh’s account of the battle for Crete, with its stark and humiliating depiction of the British army in shabby, demoralized, cowardly retreat, is one of the great passages of wartime prose.”

Clearly in the battle between English writers with “augh” in their names, Evelyn wins over Somerset.

Hitchens has his most obtuse comment so far in statement using the word obtuse. In describing the prototype of a Waugh protagonist he says, “…an innocent abroad; one might call him Candide if the Voltairean association were not obtuse.” …WTF!?

New learning: George Orwells last book review (unfinished, as he was dying) was for Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited…also…there is a character in Decline and Fall named Lord Tangent who is the son of Lord and Lady Circumference!

New word:  Abysinia = pre –WW II name for Ethiopia

 

Picture from the best mini-series of all time. Here's proof:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0nrC-vfaY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1S3LBDT3vk