Word: waughs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...three stories left, I liked "Perchance To Dream," by George Rinebart '50, the best, possibly because I couldn't quite figure out the point of the other two. "Perchance To Dream" is chiefly a dialogue piece, in spirit a combination of Noel Coward, James Thurber, and Evclyn Waugh. Here again a good editor would have made a big difference. The dialogue in places is poor, and no good editor would let Mr. Rinchart write instead of a simple "he said," such things as he started, he snarled, she snapped, she giggled, said the man evenly, and said the woman triumphantly...
George Meredith was the Evelyn Waugh of the Victorians. He was wondrously clever, with a wit that snapped and crackled and never faltered through more than 20 novels. "His pages so teem with fine sayings and magniloquent epigrams, gorgeous images, and fantastic locutions," said Critic W. E. Henley, that "the mind would welcome a little dullness as a glad relief." Had he had the virtue of simplicity, in addition to his other talents, he might have been to English fiction what Shakespeare is to its poetry and drama...
When you mention Vigeland to somebody in Oslo, his face brightens quickly and he asks: "What do you think of him?" Nobody in Norway, as far as I can tell, knows exactly what to think. But when outlanders like British Novelist Evelyn Waugh attack their favorite son, Norwegians are shocked and depressed. "The most heathen thing I have seen in Europe," Waugh recently told an interviewer. "A subhuman zoo in bronze and granite . . . more terrible than the ruins of Hiroshima...
...Victorian form of father, Sir George Sitwell, Bart., makes the other characters (even such brilliant ones as Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot) look slightly dwarfish. Something of father Sitwell's impressiveness can be judged from the fact that when 24-year-old Evelyn Waugh, already a hardened connoisseur of the old regime, first laid eyes on him, Waugh simply became incapable of speech -"struck mute, in a kind of ecstasy of observation...
Ordinarily I'm a devotee of both Wolcott Gibbs and Evelyn Waugh. So when I read Gibbs' delighted review of Waugh's "The Loved One" in the New Yorker last summer, I got hold of the book, clapped my hands for joy, and sat down for a good time. Now usually Waugh is excruciating and malevolent and vastly inventive. But not in "The Loved One." It is chiefly a one-joke book, and the joke isn't very good--it's about funeral parlor techniques--nor is its effect savage. So practically nothing of Waugh is there--little malevolence, less...