Word: waughs
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...LEISURE reading Dunne claims to read very little contemporary fiction, although he enjoys studying the works of other authors to discern their techniques: "I read a lot of books." For pleasure, the Connecticut-based author re-reads Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh: "But most specifically and definitely not Brideshead. It's a sumptuous bore. "However, he has nothing but praise for fellow fiction author John Updike and his latest, Rabbit is Rich...
...right decision. Waugh, one of the great prose craftsmen of the 20th century, must have realized that his 14-year-old Charles was a faint carbon copy of his public school self. Ryder attends "Spierpoint" just after World War I; Waugh went to Lancing at the same time. Details and dialogue are loosely transplanted from the author's diaries. Like Waugh, young Ryder exhibits a monkish passion for drawing and illuminated texts. Unlike the grave, sentimental narrator of Brideshead, Charles the teen-ager can sound as curmudgeonly as his middle-aged maker: "I think the invention of movable type...
...chapter's conclusion has the weight and shape of Waugh, the critic of modernism and the Age of the Common Man: "He was aware of a new voice in his inner counsels... a voice, as it were, from a more civilized age as from the chimney corner in mid-Victorian times there used to break sometimes the sardonic laughter of grandmama, relic of Regency, a clear, outrageous, entirely self-assured disturber among the high and muddled thought of her whiskered descendants...
There is no doubt that the work is authentic. The original 20-page, handwritten manuscript is stored at the University of Texas' Humanities Research Center at Austin, the main repository of Waugh's papers since 1967. U.T. Research Librarian Ellen Dunlap notes that the unbound folio of Schooldays bears the novelist's signature and the date Oct. 13, 1945. It is reasonable to assume that Waugh, flushed with Brideshead"s critical and popular success, decided to give a primed public more about Charles Ryder. Chapter 1 bears one piece of sad news: his mother was killed...
...contract inside an irony. The author's son Auberon acknowledges that the work is not worth "splashing around." Yet, he adds, "that's why we let the TLS have it." The journal then promotes this bottom-drawer curiosity as a "scoop," which is the title of Evelyn Waugh's classic satire on the press...