Word: waughs
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...would like to be among the first of the literary hawkshaws to point out that the fairy tale [about an eccentric actress who gave a party and forgot to mail the invitations] on which Billy Rose was anticipated by Evelyn Waugh [TIME, June 12] was not original with Mr. Waugh, either. In Hesketh Pearson's biography, Oscar Wilde [Harper; 1946], we find Wilde telling a florid version of it to a friend on whom he fobbed it off as a true story about one of his own family. And since Wilde was no stickler for pure originality, the tale...
...looks as if it were the turn of British Author Evelyn Waugh to give a party...
...another chorus to the celebrated [Gertrude] Stein song, and say that a Rose is a Waugh is a Wilde; which is a harrowing enough hybrid for anyone...
Readers less forgetful than Harriet Reeves promptly took Rose to task. Wasn't his tale the same as a short story of Evelyn Waugh's, first published in 1936 under the title "Bella Fleace Gave a Party'? Waugh's story told about a lonely, eccentric Irishwoman who had also resolved to give a ball for the neighbors she had so long neglected. None of the invited guests came. Concluded Waugh: "A day later she died. Mr. Banks [her heir] . . . spent a week sorting out her effects. Among them he found in her escritoire, stamped, addressed...
Said Rose, who had never read the Waugh story: "It's one of those stinking, unbelievable coincidences...