Farewell to Evelyn Waugh

ONE of the unexpected pleasures of my career was meeting the model for William Boot, anti-hero of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s anti-Bible for journalists. Boot is the unworldly English nature columnist who finds himself suddenly transformed into a war correspondent in darkest Africa. Waugh modeled him on William Deedes, a young reporter he had known in Abyssinia in the 1930s. Sixty years later I met Deedes at the Republican convention in San Diego, at a lunch of Brit journos that I went to with John O’Sullivan. In Deedes’s sweetness and mildness I saw the materials that Waugh’s malicious genius had used to make his newsroom Candide.

It is a measure of the esteem in which I, and any literate journalist my age, held Waugh that I prized the encounter so much. I took a double pleasure as a conservative journalist, for I not only admired Waugh’s prose and his satire of my profession, but shared his caustic view of the world. Yet I now know that one of our tasks for the rest of my life-and for the rest of the century beyond that-is to bid farewell to Evelyn Waugh: not to the stylist, the farceur, the elegist, but to Waugh the author of Scoop and Black Mischief, Waugh the anthropologist.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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ONE of the unexpected pleasures of my career was meeting the model for William Boot, anti-hero of Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s anti-Bible for journalists. Boot is the unworldly English nature columnist who finds himself suddenly transformed into a war correspondent in darkest Africa. Waugh modeled him on William Deedes, a young reporter he had known in Abyssinia in the 1930s. Sixty years later I met Deedes at the Republican convention in San Diego, at a lunch of Brit journos that I went to with John O’Sullivan. In Deedes’s sweetness and mildness I saw the materials that Waugh’s malicious genius had used to make his newsroom Candide.

It is a measure of the esteem in which I, and any literate journalist my age, held Waugh that I prized the encounter so much. I took a double pleasure as a conservative journalist, for I not only admired Waugh’s prose and his satire of my profession, but shared his caustic view of the world. Yet I now know that one of our tasks for the rest of my life-and for the rest of the century beyond that-is to bid farewell to Evelyn Waugh: not to the stylist, the farceur, the elegist, but to Waugh the author of Scoop and Black Mischief, Waugh the anthropologist.