Word: waughs
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...fiction." He could not accept Wolfe as PR man extraordinary, whose technique is to exaggerate--sometimes even to invent--fact in an effort to get at the truth. And, in certain cases, Wolfe has made notable gaffs--where the New Yorker study demanded the cruel precision of an Evelyn Waugh, Wolfe stuffed in the vitality of a Rabelais. As they have developed, however, Wolfe's essays have taken on a more structured approach (and he is now working on a reportorial novel), but he will always remain the great journalist of kitsch. He is the chronicler of modern America...
Love of Gab. Anthony Burgess is not merely a specialist with some painfully acquired, crotchety expertise in, say, lesser metaphysical lyrical poets. His intelligence functions at all levels on a list of subjects that includes Dickens, Kipling, Sartre, Greene, Waugh, Koestler, Milton, "The Writer As Drunk" (Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan), Shaw, Joyce, pornography and Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss...
Powell's world is special, as special as Proust's. In Evelyn Waugh's much-quoted observation, Powell has even been rated Proust's equal-with the qualification that he is much funnier. All the best jokes are family jokes, and the British Establishment is one of the closest of all cultural families. One no more needs to be a member of it to relish Anthony Powell than one needs to be a French homosexual with aristocratic friends to enjoy Proust. Like the peculiar British fondness for cold toast, though, a taste for Powell...
...Road to Wigan Pier, he experienced the squalor of hopelessness while his pink pals were pitying the proletariat. At the end of his life, when he was dying of TB, he characteristically decided to treat it on a fog-swept island off Scotland's west coast. Evelyn Waugh visited him on his deathbed, and the reactionary Catholic gourmet saw a rare quality in the socialist agnostic puritan. To Cyril Connolly, Waugh solemnly said: "He is very near to God." Told of this, Orwell sniffed: "Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions...
...interviews with the headmaster, a Waugh refugee nicknamed Dr. Rabelais, are symptomatic. The man seems plunged in a "burrow of vagueness." As Rabelais drones on in a voice reminiscent of "old curtains," Jimmy feels "woofed more and more tightly into an endless tapestry." The poor lad cannot tell whether his questions are being answered, or even remember exactly what the questions were. For consolation he flicks mentally through colored-slide images of the post-World War II America that he thinks he misses...