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Waughior - Book Review

National Interest, The, Winter, 2003 by Keith B. Richburg

William Deedes, At War With Waugh (London: Macmillan, 2003), 125 pp., 12.99 [pounds sterling]

IT HAS long been one of the worst. kept secrets among that tight-knit community of those of us commonly deemed "war correspondents"; that is, that Evelyn Waugh's fictitious masterpiece Scoop, about journalistic follies in a make-believe place called Ismaelia, was in fact not parody at all, but a frighteningly accurate portrait of the working press at its very worst. But what makes Scoop even more enduring is that it seems to defy time. Waugh's nature-writer-turned-war-reporter William Boot, crating up his cleft sticks and canoe to travel to the front, could just as easily have been the latter-day hacks in Kuwait last February and March, stocking their rented Land Cruisers with boxes of tuna, cartons of bottled water, and fuel-laden jerry-cans, while twiddling their thumbs for weeks in five-star hotels waiting for the bombs to begin falling on Baghdad.

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Now along comes William Deedes, the 89-year-old former editor of Britain's Daily Telegraph, with a short and delightful new memoir, At War With Waugh, in time for Evelyn Waugh's centenary, in which he gives us some juicy tidbits into the making of Waugh's classic while providing more evidence yet that Scoop was indeed closer to fact than fiction. Deedes was sent to Abyssinia in 1935 at the age of 22, a novice reporter who had never traveled beyond Switzerland, and he has long been rumored to be the true-life character on which Waugh's William Boot was based. Deedes, of course, gamely denies this--Waugh's Boot, after all, flew to Paris, then took the train to Marseilles, while Deedes went first to Calais. But for most of his 134 pages, Deedes proceeds to describe almost exactly the scenes and even the characters that made Waugh's Scoop perhaps his most memorable work.

In trying to deny he was the model for Boot, one can accept Lord Deedes' protests--but only "up to a point", as Waugh might say. When Deedes describes his own 600-pound kit for making his virgin foray as a correspondent--tropical suits, riding breeches for winter and summer, camp bed and sleeping bag, as well as bottles of quinine pills and "slabs of highly nutritious black chocolate"--the reader is reminded instantly of William Boot's consignment of a canoe, a humidor, ant-proof clothes box and the famous cleft sticks, to be used for filing his yarns. Deedes ended up traveling with Waugh--already a famous novelist and a seasoned Africa traveler with only one suitcase. Reading Deedes' account, one can gleefully imagine Waugh scribbling the notes from which Boot of the Beast would eventually take form. Even Deedes is forced to concede "I was not to know that such extravagance would contribute to Evelyn Waugh's portrait of William Boot in Scoop, the novel he later wrote about journalists covering the war."

The young Deedes finds Waugh a difficult character with a streak of irritability. But he seems genuinely affectionate towards Waugh. "He had a weakness for well-connected people, but unlike a lot of so-called snobs, he was adept at conversing with people of small importance, though often baffling them with his brand of wit." Among the many insights in this memoir, Deedes finds that Waugh's outward disdain for journalists and journalism--which manifested itself in Scoop--may have actually sprung from a feeling of resentment, after his own brief and failed attempt at newspaper writing for the Daily Mail. Waugh, we learn, was actually not a bad journalist himself, displaying all the needed qualities of observation and attention to detail. But his time was split between writing for papers and gathering material for his books, under the contract deals he arranged to subsidize his living standard.

But while Waugh's Scoop, and its insights into journalism, can be seen as prescient, his wickedly dark view of the continent that inspired it can be seen in hindsight as even more foresighted. Africa has long been a place where the line between the sublime and the ridiculous is often blurred to the point of invisibility. As a correspondent there in the 1990s, I found myself often standing as witness to scenes that could have come directly from Waugh's satirical pen. His novel Black Mischief,, written incredibly in 1932, could have easily been a parody of modern-day Africa's failed states and senseless, ongoing tribal conflicts. If anything, Waugh's hapless "Emperor Seth"--with his obsession with all things modern and European--might be considered an enlightened intellectual compared to some of today's African Big Men who have made such a mess of their own countries.

Consider: Waugh's fictitious Seth, ruler of Azania, issues decrees on a whim, depending on which book he most recently read. He orders that a museum be set up, because the country doesn't have one and needs a museum to be "modern." And he prints money bearing his own image, in top hat and tails, and keeps stacks of the stuff stashed in a cupboard. When Seth's exasperated white aide complains, the Emperor replies, "I assure you. It was easy.... [A]nd now that the plates have been made, it is quite inexpensive to print as many more as we require."

Waughior - Book Review

National Interest, The, Winter, 2003 by Keith B. Richburg

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