Nancy Lemann on Evelyn Waugh

"When I was young my hero was Evelyn Waugh."

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser Evelyn Waugh. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. This week, we've unlocked an interview from the archive selected by Nancy Lemann, whose story "The Oyster Diaries" appears in our new Summer issue, no. 248. When I was young my hero was Evelyn Waugh. It was the restraint, the precision of his writing that pierced my heart. Not surprisingly, his interview in The Paris Review (1963) is among the shortest ever conducted there. I learned from Waugh that it is OK to be terse. Not only is it OK to be terse. It is better to be terse. He regarded writing as "an exercise in the use of language." An exercise he conducted with the keenest acuity. I always felt that reading him was like taking a bath in sheer intelligence. Raymond Chandler describes the quality I see in Waugh: "When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or … It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball." For the profile of a professional writer plainly modeled on himself as in Scoop or The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the material is presented with brazen verisimilitude, sardonic cynicism yet a strange humility. And who can forget the fate of the obsolete poet in The Loved One: "He was the least vain of literary men, and as a consequence, the least remembered." Among the legends—or more accurately, to my mind, truisms—that accrued after Waugh's death is that he was cold-hearted and obnoxious. His eldest son, Auberon Waugh, reproduces in his autobiography several stark examples. After taking "the boy Auberon" to the zoo, Waugh writes to his wife, "I have regretfully come to the conclusion that the boy Auberon is not yet a suitable companion for me." I detect great dignity and kindness in those words—far from cold and cruel. He was a nerve-racked father whose fractious children posed a threat to his concentration: his was a dedication to his calling so complete that neurotic anxiety was only its natural result. Outside of the domestic realm he put forth a curmudgeonly persona. You see it in the interview. Like he's in a bad mood, and/or being studiously perverse. But it's a pose! I see through it! In a way it's all just part of not being sappy. The interviewer asks Waugh what he thinks of a certain critic of his work. "Is he an American?" asks Waugh rhetorically, trying to catch the interviewer in his trap. "I don't think what they have to say is of much interest, do you?" An age-old British tic to deride Americans and their sunny jolly innocence. Reminding me of the scene in Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder's father gets the chimerical idea that a friend his son has brought to dinner is American, and spends the rest of the evening elaborately insulting the perplexed visitor with veiled allusions to his nationality. The blades are sharpest in The Loved One, where the uncouth and inane customs of Los Angeles comprise for the sardonic hero an artistic epiphany ("In a zone of insecurity in the mind where none but the artist dare trespass, the tribes were mustering") until in the end he departs with his vision, "bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless shore …" It's funny how some prefer the early Waugh. His first two books—Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies—exercises in wicked wit, came before the sorrow which later defined him (his first wife left him for another man) and was the making of him. Those early books are too light. Take P. G. Wodehouse—too relentlessly humorous, which gets tedious. One pines for something deeper. The beauty of Waugh is the full complement of both comedy and tragedy. That spark of despair amid the comedy, the mark of distinction, illuminates the picture. I used to read A Handful of Dust once a year. Usually while giving birth. There's a lot of time between when you go in (to the hospital) and when the baby is actually delivered. Like ten or twelve hours. Waugh's pain and precision and hilarity—this was "the branded drug, the sure specific, big magic." As poetry is to the sardonic hero of The Loved One. —Nancy Lemann INTERVIEW The Art of Poetry No. 30 Evelyn Waugh   INTERVIEWER May I ask you what you are writing at the moment? WAUGH An autobiography.   INTERVIEWER Will it be conventional in form? WAUGH Extremely. INTERVIEWER Are there any books which you would like to have written and have found impossible?? WAUGH I have done all I could. I have done my best. From issue no. 30 (Summer–Fall 1963)   To read more in issue no. 30, including poetry by Philip Levine, why not subscribe? You'll receive four print issues a year plus unlimited digital access to our seventy-one-year archive. Copyright © 2024 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.