What Evelyn Waugh saw in America | Hacker News Reader

What Evelyn Waugh saw in America

americamagazine.org

40 pointsapollinaire17 comments

This is pretty weak sauce, poorly written, and giving only superficial insight into Waugh's depth of character.

His diaries probably give the most insight, but if you only read Brideshead Revisited, you'll be a much richer person.

I guess I don't understand what I'm supposed to find in Evelyn Waugh. Previously I've only ever heard the name in "Lost in Translation": "Evelyn Waugh was a man." Skimming the article, I see a bunch of "blah blah" about a rich Brit partying in America last century. The wikipedia page claims "He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century". If you say so. What am I missing?

There seems to be a lack of a large contingent of people in HN who are deeply into literary fiction. If you are into that kind of an interest, his name along with the likes of Arnold Bennett, Theodore Dressier, William Howard Dean, Sinclair Lewis, Rebecca West, Thomas Berger, Wallace Stegner, John Galsworthy, etc among many others would have instant recognition.

Waugh specially was an established novelist before world war 2. He participated in various theaters in Europe, and later wrote about them. He may have been one of the foremost chroniclers of the British Experience in WW2. I doubt Americans have someone of similar achievement to compare. Herman Wouk isn't of the same level as Waugh.

Of course there was even the episode of his name featuring in the 100 'Women' novelists of 20th century list of Time magazine.

> Of course there was even the episode of his name featuring in the 100 'Women' novelists of 20th century list of Time magazine.

For those curious, it was in a small 2016 article about college textbooks [1] ("These Are the 100 Most-Read Female Writers in College Classes"). Not some prominent 100 women novelists of the 20th century list that was their cover story. At the bottom of the page it has a correction notice. People like to say Time Magazine made the mistake, because it blows it out of proportion and sounds better. If you say that one writer - David Johnson - made a mistake, it entirely loses its punch.

[1] https://time.com/4234719/college-textbooks-female-writers/

> People like to say Time Magazine made the mistake, because it blows it out of proportion and sounds better. If you say that one writer - David Johnson - made a mistake, it entirely loses its punch.

Publications have editors on staff to check what they publish, before they print and distribute millions of copies of every sentence in the issue. There's a longstanding and ubiquitous norm that publications are absolutely responsible for what they publish, and for good reason. You may as well say that Facebook isn't responsible for its norm violation du jour; just the PM who thought of it and the couple engineers that implemented it.

(which isn't to say that this is anything more than mildly amusing, but claiming that attributing the error to Time instead of one of its writers is "blowing it out of proportion" couldn't be more wrong)

I should hope it's a team effort. Either Johnson had no oversight or he was not solely responsible. That's like GitHub saying "the outage has been fixed. but it wasn't us! It was ${joe beef @ github}"

It helped that his wife was also named Evelyn, although the female version is pronounced slightly differently.

The male pronunciation is 'EVE-lin' versus the female 'ev-A-lin.'

> What am I missing?

The reading of his books. No obligation to do so, but if you want to make up your own mind (and it sounds as if you do, good stuff), that's the way to go.

Only read Decline and Fall, but it was pretty funny. A good middle of he twentieth century British comedic novel.

Apparently Brideshead Revisited is among those lines as well.

Brideshead Revisited is only funny in places, and much better than Decline and Fall.

I've long suspected that Decline and Fall is an insider chronicle pretending to be a comedy - and that's the real joke.

I believe there was a remake recently. The script was somewhat modified, but a common outline remained recognisable.

Waugh gets points for being funny, but I couldn't read the diaries without suspecting that he was an extremely unsympathetic person with more skeletons in his cupboards than was healthy.

Waugh is one of the funniest writers in the English language.

I highly recommend his "Sword of Honour" trilogy.

You can be excused for being uneducated but dismissing an author you don't seem to have read just seems absurd.

This is a really strange take. There are many books or authors I wouldn't read and can easily dismiss. Like The Turner Diaries by William Luther Pierce. I can easily dismiss that book and its author on the merit that I wouldn't take anything away from it, based on its premise.

Well, William Pierce is not generally considered a paragon of English literature, so it's not quite the same thing.

What you're missing perhaps is an opportunity for self reflection as an American, when viewed through the lens of another culture not entirely incompatible, perhaps even once it's equal.

Waughs point appears to be that this is not really possible for Americans, and that the American empire continues to rule in spite of this fact.

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