Since my reading schedule has folded in on itself (one book lead to another which lead to another) and I am finally working my way out of that rabbit hole for the book that was supposed to be for this week, I will delay that post for the time being and, instead, as my friend recently returned my loaned copy of Scoop, I will provide my modest and perhaps overly-enthusiastic thoughts on Evelyn Waugh’s Novel About Journalism.
There is not much that can be said about this book that has not been said. It is well-established that The Great Fleet Street Novel shed a light on the journalistic forces at play in manipulating public opinion with almost prophetic accuracy way back in 1938, even more so now than in 2011. If it is true that almost every D.C. “political junkie” journalist carried a copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 then the same must be said for the same breed of Foreign Correspondent “political junkie” journalist (the origin of this claim of Thompson’s presence in the bars of DC still eludes me, but if anyone knows who originally stated this, I am almost positive it was in book form, please do let me know). Hell, it was my personal aspirations of being a conflict-zone journalist during my Undergrad years that led my picking up Scoop and devour it almost overnight.
As one can gather from the above, the book reads rather quickly. It is a simple story at heart, one of a slight confusion that sends the wrong “correspondent” to a fictional African nation to cover the political and social happenings at the time. The book is filled with Waugh’s trademark witticisms under the guise of “The Wrong Man Abroad” style antics (in reference to Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad).
The book, the so-called “novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Hecht and MacArthur’s ‘Front Page’ and, to a smaller extent, Michael Frayn’s ‘Towards the End of the Morning.’ ” (quote by Christopher Hitchens as written in the Introduction section for the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of Scoop), is not one of Waugh’s most popular works. That title is perhaps better awarded to his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Regardless, Scoop remains a wonderful glimpse into the criticisms of journalism already exisiting as early as 1938 and how difficult it would be to differ the criticisms of the time from modern criticisms of the very same industry.
Waugh himself, a travel writer and journalist by career, had, by 1938, had a fair share of experience amongst the “writers in a foreign land” scene. After a lengthy trip to South America and two seperate trips to Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) representing a number of news publications, Waugh already had his feet wet as a foreign correspondent as well as somewhat of a critic of the journalism industry (as implied by his diaries, he hardly looked upon his time as correspondent in Abyssinia with much discernable seriousness).
His reflections upon this time in his life have since been heavily criticized for its pro-colonial attitudes towards the Italian intervention in the area, calling the region, “a savage place which Mussolini was doing well to tame”. He is, of course, a product of his time, a time in which acceptance of perceived merits of colonialism would have been roughly the status quo, especially for a young writer recently graduating from Oxford – cut from the same cloth of those intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group and, more specifically, responsible for The Dreadnought Hoax. That said, he was, by all accounts, a far more unpleasant individual to be around in person (more of the interesting accounts of the “nastiest-tempered man in England” abound amongst the number of biographies written on him, see below).
Politics, dialectics, and colonial theory aside, Scoop plays its role perfectly apolitical, as the absurdity of most beliefs portrayed walk a thin line of the author’s veiled opinioins, or simply the opinions of those around him; the exact population he wished to criticize.
Upon his death in 1966 after attending Easter Sunday Mass due to heart failure (he had been in declining health for well over a decade), however, the position in which his sizeable bibliography found itself in was one of legal confusion. The date of the inclusion of his works into the Public Domain has resulted, as is often the case, in a limited amount of his work publically available in France, Canada and others, leaving the United States Waugh-free until 2024 at the earliest, and the fate unknown in other countries where his work has been published. It takes a bit of digging, but to begin this interesting Rabbit Hole dive, this statement from the Waugh Estate combined with the work of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain out of Duke University is a great place to start.
Waugh himself is an interesting character, and although the main body of his work has its impact firmly elsewhere in the halls of the Academy and various other literary circles. His character, extensive library, and ideas of a “simple yet educated writer from Oxford” are the point of much deserved discussion and debate. That said, his influence amongst the journalist crowd is already written in stone, no questions asked. Scoop continues to inspire countless journalists, writers and students across the world. Merely look at its inclusions of various top 100 lists by the likes of The Observer or Modern Library. Scoop is a short novel, a joy to read, and will continue to be a book I frequenly recommend to friends. The work of Waugh himself, however, I do not recommend as readily, interesting as it may be.
To see more about the book, or to refresh your memory if you read it many moons ago, check out this Cultural Op-Ed from one William Francis Deeds, a contemporary of Waugh’s.
For another interesting view into Waugh’s life, The Evelyn Waugh Collection from at the University of Texas Austin not only includes an entire inventory of his library, but also many of the objects within the library itself, in addition to countless other Entangled Things Waugh encountered in his life. A Catelogue of the collection made in 1981 can be found here.
Varasi Academica 