Word: vileness
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Waugh's work has survived the age that produced it. We do not read Vile Bodies because it is a spoof of something we care about; we care about the Bright Young Things of Mayfair (if we care at all) only because of Vile Bodies and novels like it. Waugh's prose style is recognized as crystalline and authentic. His characters, born in a half-life between portrait and imagination, are fully his creations now, now that the originals have been forgotten. Those who insist on relegating Waugh to the position of a minor writer will have to be convinced...
...History of the Eskimos emerged from the printer as Decline and Fall in 1928. Waugh, at 24, had found his calling as a master of black comedy and satire. Other novels, among them Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and Black Mischief, followed regularly throughout the '30s, always in Waugh's elegant, crystalline style. He traveled adventurously, a fascinated observer of the often comic clash between primitive and advanced cultures. From a newspaper assignment to cover the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, he got the material for Scoop, still a hilarious guide to the adrenaline world of journalism. Much...
...distrust" in the world. Congress was less restrained. Both houses denounced the action and promised an immediate reappraisal of U.S. involvement in the U.N. Conservative Senator James Buckley of New York charged that "the General Assembly has decided to institutionalize one of the world's most vile and ancient prejudices, anti-Semitism...
Sweet Movie was shown two years ago at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then it has acquired a justifiably vile reputation. A sort of live-action animated cartoon, the movie is a paean to the joys of insanity. Should there be any mistaking this intent, Director Dusan Makavejev (who made another Reichian parable, WR-Mysteries of the Organism) includes a little ditty with the refrain, "It's a joy to be crazy/ Good to be sad.../ Good to practice deadly sin/ To be alive and to win." Irony, if intended, is imperceptible...
...Once this happened, of course, the film was defended by other black groups charging censorship. They claimed that although Coonskin indeed showed blacks as hookers, hoodlums and con artists, it also showed the principal characters as tough, smart and ultimately victorious over still worse oppressors-mainly, corrupt cops and vile mafiosi...