Horrors of Waugh | Hacker News Reader

Horrors of Waugh

the-tls.co.uk

32 pointslermontov9 comments

Waugh is one of the great writers of all time and one of the worst documented humans, who didn't go to jail or commit genocide. This article does little justice to what a stinker he was.

His parenting was abusive and bizarre. I remember reading one of his letters in which he writes (I've checked the reference - letter to Ann Fleming 1952):

"My sexual passion for my ten year old daughter is obsessive..."

Later in another letter he writes (can't find ref):

"My unhealthy interest in my daughter has abated. I now detest her as much as the rest of my children"

Edit: took out the part about him being mad - no evidence of that really. I just find recordings of him horrible to listen to.

For another case of a great writer who is an awful human being, check out V.S. Naipaul. A beast to his wife, and not in the least ashamed of it. Here is his wife:

"Last night I spoke of him letting me know the morning, nay the afternoon after our marriage, that he didn’t really want to be married to me. Yes, he said, he wanted to ask my permission to write about that … Would anyone, I asked, enjoy reading about that? I put in my usual plea: fiction & comedy … I am very low. But then perhaps it is my own fault."

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/cruel-a...

Here's Hitchens (who wrote the piece you linked) quoting Orwell (yes, that Orwell) on Waugh:

In 1895, when Oscar Wilde was jailed, it must have needed very considerable moral courage to defend homosexuality. Today it would need no courage at all: today the equivalent action would be, perhaps, to defend antisemitism. But this example that I have chosen immediately reminds one of something else—namely, that one cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it..... Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.

Then Hitchens himself:

I have already mentioned that the gross pedophilia of "Decline and Fall" is so artfully suggested that an adolescent might read it unawares.

and

But toying with his innocents, and showing how cleverly and suddenly their creator could bring them low, was for Waugh part of a serious mandate. He wanted to bring the Book of Job to life for those who had never read, or who feared, it.

(If you haven't read the biblical book of Job then the eviliness of this may miss you)

During his wartime service—which, it must be said, was often conspicuous for its gallantry—he almost had to be protected from assassination at the hands of the soldiers under his command.

While it is well known that Waugh was a fascist sympathizer Hitchens makes it pretty clear that this persisted throughout WW2:

Guy Crouchback [in one of Waugh's books] regards the Yugoslav partisans as mere cyphers for Stalin, sympathizes with the local Fascists, and admires the discipline of the German occupiers. We know from many published memoirs that Waugh himself was eventually removed from this theater of operations for precisely that sort of insubordination.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/05/the-per...

I read Decline and Fall by Waugh, and it was delightful. It recounts the continuous comic misfortunes of the main character throughout his life, and ends with an extremely memorable metaphor. I assume if you're reading this comment thread you're at least somewhat interested in Evelyn Waugh's writing, so I'll just paste the passage here even though it's not quite on topic:

“Life is like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all around, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh too. It's great fun.

You see, the nearer you can get to the hub of the wheel the slower it is moving and the easier it is to stay on. There's generally someone in the centre who stands up and sometimes does a sort of dance. Often he's paid by the management, though, or, at any rate, he's allowed in free. Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it; I'm not very near that point myself. Of course the professional men get in the way. Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. How they all shriek and giggle! Then there are others, like Margot, who sit as far out as they can and hold on for dear life and enjoy that. But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all, if you don't want to. People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone."

You should have added an Amazon affiliate link with that quote, I would have clicked it. :-) Ordered the Kindle copy based that quote alone. That, and I knew she wrote Brideshead Revisited, though haven't read it or seen the mini series.

A point of pedantry: Evelyn Waugh was male (and, briefly, married to a woman who was also named Evelyn).

I lived in Ethiopia at the end of the reign of Haile Selassie and left there right at the start of the revolution, which is why Waugh's writing on Ethiopia just horrifies me: https://www.historytoday.com/jeffrey-meyers/abyssinia-out-sh...

Waugh's book The Loved One made me want to rinse my hands in holy water after reading it.

Bad memories of forcing myself to slog through his writings in high school.

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