Word: waughs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...your article on Evelyn Waugh [Feb. 12], you mentioned Edmund Wilson's 1944 judgment on Waugh, but you didn't quote Waugh's reaction when in 1962 the interviewer for Paris Review asked him if he found Wilson's criticism helpful...
...essential Waugh hero is a British Don Quixote dejectedly tilting at the 20th century. His troubles begin with a code of honor that is ill suited for campaigns in society or on the battlefield. Humor is shaped by innumerable collisions with bad manners, bad writing, bad architecture and bad service...
...voyages abound in Waugh; indeed, he has launched more ships of fools than any other modern writer. There is also much seasickness that often resem bles a queasiness with the world itself. In the Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) a middle-aged writer suffers paranoid hallucinations while cruising to Ceylon. Voices of passengers plotting murder and humiliation filter into his ears from parts of the ship. The author acknowledged that he too suffered hallucinatory episodes, and Pinfold's curmudgeonly character and opinions are essentially...
...strongest tastes were negative," writes Waugh of Pinfold. "He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz-everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: It is later than you think,' which was designed to cause un easiness. It was never later than Mr. Pin fold thought...
...also never too late to read or reread Waugh. His vitality, matchless craftsmanship, audacious imagination and stinging perceptions ("She wore the livery of the highest fashion, but as one who dressed to inform rather than to attract") have not dated. Like Charles Ryder, the painter hero of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh focused "the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism...