Wednesday, August 09, 2006
The witty Waughs
As I've mentioned before, on sunny mornings I like to read in the nearby park before opening the shop. Over the weekend I picked up a bunch of Penguin reprints of Evelyn Waugh's travel books, including his first, Labels, which I haven't yet read. So I started it in the park this morning, and the wit, the wit, it's so good it had me chuckling to myself, no doubt alarming passers-by:
"Now, one of the arts of successful authorship is preventing the reading public from forgetting one's name in between the times when they are reading one's books. It is all very puzzling because, as far as I can see, there are only two respectable reasons for reading a book written by someone else; one is that you are being paid to review it, and the other that you are continually meeting the author and it seems rude not to know about him. But clearly there are masses of people to whom neither of these reasons apply. They read books because they have heard the author's name. Now, even if you are very industrious, you cannot rely on writing more than two books a year, which will employ your public, as it is called, for about six hours each. That is to say, that for every hour in which you employ your reader's attention, you are giving her a month to forget you." (pp.7-8)
As he leaves off these humbling ruminations and packs for his journey (of which this book is the record), he says:
"... I packed up all my clothes and two or three very solemn books, such as Spengler's Decline of the West, and a great many drawing materials, for two of the many quite unfulfilled resolutions which I made about this trip were that I was going to do some serious reading and drawing." (p.9)
Labels was first published in 1930, when Waugh was just twenty-seven. There must be, somewhere, sound recordings of him reading his work. I'd love to hear them, because as I read to myself, I can hear a smart, clipped, English voice. A bit later in the book is an amusing anecdote about his being mistaken in Paris for his brother Alec, also a writer, and originally more popular than Evelyn, probably until Brideshead Revisited was published. One of my favorite travel memoirs is Alec's book Hot Countries. Perhaps I'll write a longer post soon on travel books, but for today, it's the witty Waugh brothers.
"Now, one of the arts of successful authorship is preventing the reading public from forgetting one's name in between the times when they are reading one's books. It is all very puzzling because, as far as I can see, there are only two respectable reasons for reading a book written by someone else; one is that you are being paid to review it, and the other that you are continually meeting the author and it seems rude not to know about him. But clearly there are masses of people to whom neither of these reasons apply. They read books because they have heard the author's name. Now, even if you are very industrious, you cannot rely on writing more than two books a year, which will employ your public, as it is called, for about six hours each. That is to say, that for every hour in which you employ your reader's attention, you are giving her a month to forget you." (pp.7-8)
As he leaves off these humbling ruminations and packs for his journey (of which this book is the record), he says:
"... I packed up all my clothes and two or three very solemn books, such as Spengler's Decline of the West, and a great many drawing materials, for two of the many quite unfulfilled resolutions which I made about this trip were that I was going to do some serious reading and drawing." (p.9)
Labels was first published in 1930, when Waugh was just twenty-seven. There must be, somewhere, sound recordings of him reading his work. I'd love to hear them, because as I read to myself, I can hear a smart, clipped, English voice. A bit later in the book is an amusing anecdote about his being mistaken in Paris for his brother Alec, also a writer, and originally more popular than Evelyn, probably until Brideshead Revisited was published. One of my favorite travel memoirs is Alec's book Hot Countries. Perhaps I'll write a longer post soon on travel books, but for today, it's the witty Waugh brothers.
