Word: waughs
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...began last fall as routine business for A.D. Peters, the London literary agency that represented Evelyn Waugh and now handles publication rights for the novelist's estate. Says Managing Director Michael Sissons: "We had called up the Waugh files, going back to shortly after his death [1966] to look for evidence, while trying to renegotiate some of the paperback royalty rates." Suddenly the familiar rustle of contracts became the startling flutter of serendipity. "Out of the 1970 file," says Sissons, "dropped a typescript of Chapter I of Charles Ryder's Schooldays...
...expanded March 5 issue, TLS carries the previously unpublished 12,500 words that Waugh intended as the opening to a Brideshead sequel. The book, begun in 1945, the same year that Brideshead appeared, was to have been a flashback to Charles Ryder's life before he went up to Oxford and met Sebastian Flyte. But the one chapter, titled "Ryder by Gas-Light," is all he wrote. Sissons believes that the author decided to abandon the project after discussions with Peters, the late founder of the agency and one of Waugh's close friends...
Here is Evelyn Waugh, "extraordinarily like a loquacious woman, with dinner jacket cut like maternity gown to hide his bulging stomach . . . playing this part of a crochety old character rather deaf, cupping his ear - 'feller's a bit of a Socialist I suspect.' Amusing for about a quarter of an hour." Here is Graham Greene delighted when a bomb from the blitz hits his house, symbolizing not only the end of his estate, but of his marriage; Arthur Koestler, "all antennae and no head," and Novelist Rose Macaulay "looking immensely aged, everything about her having diminished except...
...trouble, for which Waugh is really responsible, comes after Sebastian takes up a drunkard's residence in the remoteness of North Africa. When he leaves-for the last several hours, he is never seen-he takes with him the story's focal point and vitality. Like many narrators, Charles is a reactor, someone who responds to people more interesting than himself. When he is forced to stand in the spotlight, he does not know what to do, and therefore does nothing...
...think Charles might have had a little more glamour," Waugh's friend Nancy Mitford delicately complained to him when he sent her an advance copy of the book. Mitford saw the point of making the narrator "dim," but asked, "Would Julia and her brother and her sister all be in love with him if he was?" Irons asked himself the same question when he was assigned the role. "Is this character going to bore the audience terribly?" he wondered. "He certainly bores the pants...