So, published in the late 30s, Scoop is a kind of farewell to his beginnings as a literary enfant terrible.Īs Scoop opens, it’s the other Boot, John, a self-serious literary novelist, author of Waste of Time, who is introduced as the confidant of Mrs Algernon Stitch, a classic Waugh hostess from Mayfair. He found cruel things funny because he did not understand them, and he was able to communicate that fun.” Later, Waugh’s comic vision would mature and darken into books such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy. As Cyril Connolly wrote in Enemies of Promise: “The satire of Evelyn Waugh in his early books was derived from his ignorance of life. Actually, in its combination of farce and pathos, Scoop derives less inspiration from Ethiopia than from the world of Waugh’s brilliant early fiction such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies.īut there is a difference. It was Waugh’s experiences in Ethiopia, during the Abyssinian crisis of 1935-36, that provided the raw material for a wicked romp through the more absurd byways of Fleet Street in the 1930s.
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