elegantly dressed ill temper: a Tuesday special

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So today the British Library publishes a 1953 interview with Evelyn Waugh which is said to be “the most ill-tempered interview ever”, in which three interviewers apparently bait Waugh like three picadors goading a bull. If you can imagine such a thing. Even the description does my heart good.

From the extracts printed in the Guardian Waugh’s clarity of vision stands out like a beacon, even though one may not agree with everything he says: asked if he approved of capital punishment, for example, he refers to it as “one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked.” This may be anathema to me, which it is except in its phrasing, but his elaboration on it is positively Johnsonian in its grandeur:

“Would he carry out the act himself? ‘Do you actually mean do the hanging as well? Well, I should think it very odd for them to choose a novelist for such tasks’. Supposing they trained you? ‘Well certainly’. You would? ‘Yes’. Would you like such a job Mr Waugh? ‘Not in the least’.”

Or: “Asked what failings in others he could most readily excuse Waugh replies quickly: ‘Drunkenness’. Any others? ‘Em [long pause] … anger. Lust. Dishonouring their father and mother. Coveting their neighbour’s ox, ass, wife. Killing. I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshipping graven images. That seems to be idiotic’.”

This is a glorious sentiment , of a kind of which we hear far too little these days, when it is positively acceptable to reject someone completely because you disapprove of them. The Culture of Frowns. A friend of mine, a graphic designer, was so shocked by the stories of Eric Gill’s various odiousnesses – which are in fact shocking and odious – that he deleted Gill Sans from his computer! And he loves typography. But back to Waugh:

“The novelist admits he does not like people of disagreeable appearance. Meaning? ‘Face, hair, fingernails, teeth, clothes’.”

But in his own way, of course, Waugh has more respect for human beings than our current politically-correct, issue-driven social orthodoxy allows for, notwithstanding his social blinkers:

“By the end of the interview Waugh becomes exasperated. Asked about different nationalities, Waugh laments: ‘I clearly can’t make myself understood. There is no such thing as a man in the street. There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters’.”

This is of course an entirely fitting sentiment for a novelist, who is in the business of bringing his characters out as individuals. And if some of Waugh’s black characters are toadying fools, they are certainly no worse than the morally-bankrupt white trophy-collectors they toady to. I still remember my first ever reading of Decline and Fall; it’s one of the things I’m still the most grateful to my Aunt Babs for, just that casual, bored-summer-day remark that I might like to read this – handing me a book…

But most tantalising of all:

“On writing, Waugh – the author of novels such as Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Scoop and Brideshead Revisited – says he has always found it easy, ‘nothing easier’. He adds: ‘In those days, perhaps even now, anyone who could write at all could have a living’.”

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