Waugh Abroad [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONAs soon as I set out on my own, things began to go slightly against me.(Ninety-Two Days)In January 1932, Evelyn Waugh's American publisher, John Farrar, wrote to a friend: 'One very important literateur said to me the other day, "I think you have the most important of the young English writers in Evelyn Waugh, but my God, will you stop him writing travel books!" ' The writer Waugh looked up to as a mentor, P. G. Wodehouse, expressed a similar concern in his review of A Handful of Dust. 'What a snare this travelling business is to the young writer. He goes to some blasted jungle or other and imagines that everybody will be interested in it.'On the face of it, Waugh didn't think much of his travel books either. He found Remote People 'very dull' and Robbery Under Law like 'an interminable Times leader of 1880' ('People will say Waugh is done for; it is marriage and living in the country has done it.') Of Waugh in Abyssinia he wrote: 'If the book is boring its readers nearly as much as it is boring me to write it will create a record in low sales ' while A Tourist in Africa struck its author as 'very poor stuff hard going because I can only be funny when I am complaining about something'.One reason he judged writing these books a bitter chore is that they were undertaken to earn money, usually after he had completed a novel, and to involve minimum expenditure on his part. If a hotel or a shipping line was willing to give Waugh advantageous terms he did not blush to commend them in print. Likewise could Waugh be hired as a propagandist for the appropriate Catholic or Conservative cause. In 1935 the pro-Mussolini Daily Mail employed him as a war correspondent to cover favourably the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Two years later he entered into a secret deal with Clive Pearson to write a book excoriating the corrupt and anti-clerical government of Mexico. For the price of