On the essays shelf:
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
It is because of Hitchens’ writing that I read Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, thereby closing an unforgivable gap in my reading history. How could it be I had never read Waugh? It was just one of those things. Like everyone else on the planet, I had watched the Brideshead Revisited mini-series, back in the day, and fell in adolescent love with both leading men, lounging about in their white suits, but I just never picked up the book. For me, that is odd. I read Oliver Twist at the age of 10 because I had seen the movie. But for whatever reason (no reason at all), I had not read Waugh. Then I came across one of Hitchens’ pieces about Scoop, Waugh’s manic lampooning of the foreign press. Hitchens’ article made me laugh out loud, and the excerpts shared from the book were even funnier. I asked my dad about it and of course he had read all of Waugh’s stuff, and he started explaining the plot of Scoop to me, and started roaring so hard he couldn’t finish his sentence. So I picked up Scoop immediately.
I wrote about my reaction to the book. It was so funny that I found myself laughing so hard on the bus, all while trying to hold BACK my guffaws since I was in public, that my face froze into a garish comedy mask. I sat there, laughing as silently as I could, my face FROZEN. I’ve read funny books. This is the funniest book I have ever read.
Through a case of mistaken identity, a gentle unworldly little nature writer, who sends in pieces about hedgehogs and streams, is sent to cover some kind of violent revolution/war that is going on in a fictional country called Ishmalia. He is so unworldly that he doesn’t have the wherewithal to say, “There clearly has been a mistake. I am not a war reporter.” He just accepts that they want him for the job. He arrives in Ishmalia, with a plane-load of other foreign correspondents, all of whom are hardened veterans, each one determined to be the first to get the “scoop” of what is going down in Ishmalia.
Like most of Waugh, the comedy is brutal. The satire is vicious. The protagonist has never left his own country mansion. He does everything wrong in Ishmalia, at first. But then, through his own innocence, he gets the scoop to end all scoops.
After tearing through Scoop, and being turned into a gaping laughing statue on the bus, I read all of Waugh’s stuff. I read his letters. I read a biography. You know, I got caught up to speed. My bad for waiting for so long. But it was the humor of Hitchens’ original piece (not this one below, it was another one) that was the final straw. I am grateful.
Waugh always chose something to mock in each of his books. In Decline and Fall it was academia. In Vile Bodies, it was the entire generation coming of age after World War I – the “Pretty Young Things” generation. In The Loved One, it was the funeral home business. Brideshead Revisted isn’t a laugh-riot like the others, and keens with mourning for a world that is dying. Or, at least, an England that is dying. The England of Downton Abbey. But of course it’s also about Catholicism and the “love that dared not speak its name”, and holding onto things long past their usefulness. It is elegiac that book. It aches with mourning. Of course there are some very funny passages, the crazy time on the ship when it rocks back and forth, etc. In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh mocks (skewers, really) Fleet Street, its entire environment, its entire purpose, and mocks those who pour into a ravaged third-world country looking for a story. Nobody has high ideals. Nobody is admirable. Even the poor lead character, William Boot, isn’t admirable. He’s a dupe, really. But at least he comports himself with a modicum of dignity, having no idea what the hell he is doing. Everyone else is a drooling hyena, heartless heartless creatures.
Hitchens, naturally, has something to say about Fleet Street himself, and his time as a journalist, and he was one of those guys who would fly into a dangerous country, hole up in a hotel with all the other foreign journalists, and race around trying to talk to some radical sheikh hiding in a cave, before racing back to the hotel to push belly up to the bar and file his dispatches before deadline. So he understood that the satire was right ON. I loved it every time Hitchens mentioned Scoop. It was always with a great deal of affection, his point being: “Waugh got it so RIGHT.”
Hitchens wrote an introduction to an edition of Scoop, and here’s an excerpt. As awful as it may be, the “slogan” Hitchen refers to, for the foreign desk – of what you should say when faced with a scene of “carnage and misery” in order to get your scoop – is hysterical.
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
It’s quite permissible to read the entire Waugh canon as an original use of original sin. When he decides to play with an innocent character, that character stays played with. The Book of Job is an over-ornate trifle when set beside the caprice visited on poor little Lord Tangent, for example, in Decline and Fall. But the other John Boot, the timid and bucolic near-herbivore who is forcibly mutated into “Boot of the Beast,” is the most satisfying and, in every sense of the term, the most “finished” of Waugh’s fictional victims.
Were I asked to reminisce and expatiate at one of Lord Cooper’s infamous dinners, I could become suitably boring and prosaic about the brave days of Fleet Street. I could enlarge on the origins of its three colloquial names: “The Street of Adventure,” “The Street of Dreams,” and “The Street of Shame.” As one who briefly held the title of foreign correspondent at the old Daily Express, and who still held it when the Aitken family sold out to some properly developer or other, I can argue with room-emptying conviction that my own broken person represents that of the last Beaverbrook “fireman.” I remember that pseudo-deco dark-glassed palazzo, so near to Ludgate Circus and the plaque to Edgar Wallace; a building known half-admiringly as “The Black Lubyanka.” And I remember the thrill of its lobby and its commissionaires, as well as the surge that went through my system when taking a taxi from there to Heathrow airport; a wad of traveler’s checks at the ready and an exotic visa stamp in the old blue-and-gold hardback that was then our passport.
Was it true that the standby slogan of the Express foreign desk, for any hack stumbling on to a scene of carnage and misery, was “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?” I regret to say that it was. Is it true that an Express scribe in some hellhole, his copy surpassed by a Daily Mail man who had received an honorable flesh-wound, received a cable: “MailMan shot. Why you unshot?” I never saw the cable itself, but I did see a front-page, complete with dashing photograph of the embattled correspondent, confected from whole cloth about a world-shaking event which the intrepid hack had irretrievably missed. And there wasn’t anyone at the bar – the “mahogany ridge” from which so many fine stories were filed – who did not have his version of the following:
Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the street, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway before his window – you know.
The “you know” there is positioned to perfection. Yes, indeed we did know. There was also the matter of alcoholic etiquette:
The bunch now overflowed the hotel. There were close on fifty of them. All over the lounge and dining-rooms they sat and stood and leaned; some whispered to each other in what they took to be secrecy; others exchanged chaff and gin. It was their employers who paid for all this hospitality, but the conventions were decently observed – “My round, old boy.” “No, no, my round!” “Have this one on me.” “Well, the next is mine!” – except by Shumble, who, from habit, drank heartily and without return wherever it was offered.
At gatherings at the Europa in Belfast, in the Commodore in Beirut, at Meikles in old Rhodesia, and even in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo I have heard this banter repeated, sometimes self-consciously. The names of Waugh’s morally hollowed-out hacks are perhaps a bit Dickensian, but that can be overlooked in a near-flawless sentence like this one:
Shumble, Whelper and Pigge knew Corker; they had loitered of old on many a doorstep and forced an entry into many a stricken home.
I once met a man, in the Punch Tavern, opposite the old Beast building, who fondly explained to me that one required a solid colleague when calling on the recently bereaved. “They’ll always offer a cup of tea, see, and want to talk about the crash or the accident or the murder. So your mate offers to help in the kitchen and that’ll give you nice time to in the drawing-room and swipe the photos from the mantelpiece.” But, you notice, it takes me three times as long to explain as it did for Waugh to conjure the scene. His little story is replete with exquisite asides of the same sort, some of them short (“One native whom they questioned fled precipitately at the word ‘police'”) and some requiring a longer run-up to attain the pressure-point where mirth explodes:
They were bowling up the main street of Jacksonburg. A strip of tarmac ran down the middle; on either side were rough tracks for mules, men, cattle and camels: beyond these the irregular outline of the commercial quarter; a bank, in shoddy concrete, a Greek provisions store in timber and tin, the Cafe de la Bourse, the Carnegia Library, the Cine-Parlant, and numerous gutted sites, relics of an epidemic of arson some years back when an Insurance Company had imprudently set up shop in the city.
The last clause, with its answer-back between “insurance” and “prudence” both completes the scene and collapses the scenery. We are in Absurdistan.
