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...LETTERS OF EVELYN WAUGH Edited by Mark Amory Ticknor & Fields; 664 pages...
Before he began the task of sifting through some 4,500 surviving letters by Evelyn Waugh, Editor Mark Amory wondered if the author's handwriting was difficult to read. A friend reassured him: "No, no, you see he wrote his letters in the morning, when he was sober. He wrote his diary at night when he was drunk." On the evidence of the 840 letters collected here, Waugh sometimes tippled while he corresponded, but the contrast between this book and his Diaries (published in 1977) is as vivid as that between a buoyant raconteur and a mean lush. Here...
Triumphantly boorish in public; morose, malicious and often anguished in private: the Waugh of legend has only grown since his death in 1966, and the result is not a pretty picture. His letters show him in a much more flattering light. When he was not beset by strangers or pursued by his own demons, he genuinely cared about pleasing his friends and loved ones. He entertained and consoled, advised and gently scolded. His frequent travels took him great distances from those whose company he enjoyed, so he used the mails to talk to them, to mimic "conversation as I love...
First copies of the Dial, a slick new monthly about television, were winning rave reviews from charter subscribers this month. Billed as a program guide to public television, the Dial also features articles by first-class writers: Wilfrid Sheed on sports, Auberon Waugh on Alec Guinness, Stanley Kauffmann on acting. But the magazine was unexpectedly panned by the House of Representatives, then by the U.S. Postal Service. Reason: the Dial- which will be sent to 650,000 PBS-TV supporters in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., as part of their $25-minimum contribution-is bursting with...
...World War I, and one of the casualties was the servant mentality; the upper class no longer had a lower one to lean on. The country house survived a little longer, and even had a renaissance during the '20s and '30s, when the Evelyn Waugh crowd made elfin sport amid the topiaries. World War II and all that followed it, most notably extortionate taxes and the declining British economy, finally put these gay places to rest. A book like this, which has pedestrian prose but enchanting pictures, is perhaps the best memorial to these architectural idyls...