Farley Clinton

He was a fat and sensitive man, at once noble-minded and worldly, who looked something like a portrait of Handel and something like an elderly dowager. When I was eighteen, I was able to write to him, almost truthfully, that I had read at least twice every word he had ever had in print, and Brideshead Revisited eight times. In answer I received a postcard with this message printed in a fine, intellectual hand: “Advice to Young Writer: 1) Learn the language completely. If he intends writing in English, some knowledge of Latin is necessary; of Greek desirable. 2) Purchase bottle of ink, ream of foolscap paper, and pen (not easily found in U.S.A.). 3) Write for three hours daily, if under 30 years of age; for two hours daily, if over. 4) Revise chapter by chapter. 5) Revise entire work. 6) Publish and be damned. E. Waugh.”

I was greatly impressed. And although, in the intervening years, I have of course sometimes read books by other people, upon the whole I have kept my competence on the subject of Evelyn Waugh, and my fierce adoration, intact. For what it is worth, I have not found any other of my adolescent enthusiasms to last, except perhaps for Alexander Pope. Keats, Henry James, Firbank, magical writers, in whom I seemed to surprise the deity of language naked, divine and omnipotent, have to my aging eyes dwindled and diminished with the years. Evelyn Waugh holds his own. I am rather glad he is dead; it gave me occasion to read yet again one or two or those books which I have by now read more than twice, to be freshly delighted and enthralled by them as if I had never read them before. He is magnificent. He is as eligible as anyone else, I suppose, to rank as the first master of English prose in our time. Who would his rivals be? E. M. Forster, Nabokov, Isak Dinesen, Lytton Strachey, the incomparable Ivy Compton-Burnett. With these exceptions, his contemporaries were of minor interest, and one must look back to the mountain-peaks, to the sudden lightning on the mountain-peaks, the strange lyricism of Thomas Browne and some conversations of Shakespeare, to find language so exact and so beautiful as his.

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He was a fat and sensitive man, at once noble-minded and worldly, who looked something like a portrait of Handel and something like an elderly dowager. When I was eighteen, I was able to write to him, almost truthfully, that I had read at least twice every word he had ever had in print, and Brideshead Revisited eight times. In answer I received a postcard with this message printed in a fine, intellectual hand: “Advice to Young Writer: 1) Learn the language completely. If he intends writing in English, some knowledge of Latin is necessary; of Greek desirable. 2) Purchase bottle of ink, ream of foolscap paper, and pen (not easily found in U.S.A.). 3) Write for three hours daily, if under 30 years of age; for two hours daily, if over. 4) Revise chapter by chapter. 5) Revise entire work. 6) Publish and be damned. E. Waugh.”

I was greatly impressed. And although, in the intervening years, I have of course sometimes read books by other people, upon the whole I have kept my competence on the subject of Evelyn Waugh, and my fierce adoration, intact. For what it is worth, I have not found any other of my adolescent enthusiasms to last, except perhaps for Alexander Pope. Keats, Henry James, Firbank, magical writers, in whom I seemed to surprise the deity of language naked, divine and omnipotent, have to my aging eyes dwindled and diminished with the years. Evelyn Waugh holds his own. I am rather glad he is dead; it gave me occasion to read yet again one or two or those books which I have by now read more than twice, to be freshly delighted and enthralled by them as if I had never read them before. He is magnificent. He is as eligible as anyone else, I suppose, to rank as the first master of English prose in our time. Who would his rivals be? E. M. Forster, Nabokov, Isak Dinesen, Lytton Strachey, the incomparable Ivy Compton-Burnett. With these exceptions, his contemporaries were of minor interest, and one must look back to the mountain-peaks, to the sudden lightning on the mountain-peaks, the strange lyricism of Thomas Browne and some conversations of Shakespeare, to find language so exact and so beautiful as his.