Interview
InterviewMR. WAUGH (skeptically): Really, you liked it? I'm sure there's a good thing hidden away in it somewhere. There's too much insignificant detail though, too much emphasis on fretful detail. For so short a piece, you know.
INTERLOCUTOR: It is, nevertheless, a very funny book.
MR. WAUGH (skeptically) : You thought that, did you? I wrote it three years ago. After I got back from Spain. If I'd rewritten it now I should get into it more of the real horror, less of the fascination of travel.
INTERLOCUTOR: You made a very good thing of the "Ingrid Bergman" girl, you know, the physical culturist.
MR. WAUGH: Yes, that was rather good. There's some false things in the piece, though. The underground man now. He's a man of straw. Never met such a man. Completely invented.
INTERLOCUTOR: The discussion about short and long views at the end of the book gave a depth to the satire--it was funny and it was moving.
MR. WAUGH (skeptically): O, you liked that? I'm sure there's a good theme in it. But I didn't do it. As a matter of fact "Scott-King" was written very quickly. It was a month in the writing. That means about three to four hours a day at my desk and twelve to eighteen hours of thinking about it. You know, you go out for a walk, get a thought, come back, alter a sentence. The thing grows, goes along. About on the average each sentence is written certainly twice. All from longhand of course, no dictating, no typewriting. Just push the words around and change them, you know.
INTERLOCUTOR: George Orwell, in his review in THE NEW YORK TIMES, said you had been rude to America in "The Loved One," but that you had been equally rude to Europe in "Scott-King."
MR. WAUGH: Not equally. People said I was harsh toward
America. Not at all. I was harsher toward Europe. I've more despair for
Europe than for America. There's much more wrong therethan here.
"She's a good writer. So was Virginia Woolf--within her idiosyncrasies--but she was not as inventive as Bowen. Bowen learned a great deal from Woolf, but is a better writer."
D.H. Lawrence was a bad writer. "Philosophically he was rot," Mr. Waugh said, "and as a craftsman he was frightful." With Lawrence thus pushed to the wall, Mr. Waugh proceeded succinctly to abolish that residual talent the defenders of Lawrence claim for him: namely, his creative psychology. "Psychology--there isn't such a thing as psychology. Like the word slenderizing. There isn't such a word. The whole thing's a fraud."
American writers? Mr. Waugh thought Thomas Merton ("The Seven-Storey Mountain") and J.F. Powers ("Prince of Darkness") good young writers. "Christopher Isherwood is a good, young American writer," Mr. Waugh said. "I think you can put him down among the American writers."
"The best American writer, of course," Mr. Waugh said, "is Erle Stanley Gardner. . . . Do I really wish to say that? By all means."
Just now, Mr. Waugh himself, he says, is on leave. "I'm a very lazy man. My whole life's a vacation, occasionally interrupted by work. Though I suppose I do want to write a novel about the war, it would be a study of the idea of chivalry."
What he'd like to write, Mr. Waugh confessed, would be a detective
story. "Not like Graham Greene, but rather like the story of the Agatha
Christie or Erle Stanley Gardner sort, where the clues are given and an
actual solution takes place. I admire very much books of pure action."
MR. WAUGH (slowly, slyly): Yes, there is some thought in them, I imagine.
From:
www.britannica.com
Academic Year 2000-2001
© a.r.e.a./ Dr. Vicente Forés López
© Ana Trujillo Devis
Universitat de Vàlencia Press