Books, Arts & Manners: Evelyn Waugh: The Last Tourist

À SINGLE OIL LAMP sways from the rotting beam and so thick are the mosquitoes round it that it sheds only a pale glow. The table has long ago been devoured by ants and I write on my knees crouching on an empty cask. . . . The governor is sitting in the corner now mechanically dealing out the greasy cards in a game of patience that will never come out because the three of clubs was stolen many years ago by a Portuguese adventurer who needed it for a hand of poker. . . . The missionaries have long forsaken their vows and live openly with native women infecting them with hideous diseases. The medical officer is a leper. … As I write a crocodile snaps viciously at my feet and a cobra coils itself about the pen so I must stop and say good-bye and G.B.Y.”

The letter is dated January 1, 1933, Georgetown Club, British Guiana, and it is signed, not Indiana Jones as you might think, but Evelyn Waugh. In later photos the British satirist hardly fits our standard image of the fearless explorer: small, round, and tweedy, he looks like somebody you would expect to meet at a church sale rather than in the middle of the green hell of Guiana. Between 1928 and 1935, however, Waugh journeyed to the Middle East, Africa, and South America, and out of these travels came no fewer than four books: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Waugh in Abyssinia. In 1945 he selected five long excerpts from these and published them under the title When the Going Was Good. Inspired by the renewed interest in Waugh’s works resulting from the television success of Brideshead Revisited, Little, Brown has now reissued the book in its series of Evelyn Waugh reprints, a commendable initiative, as the book is a classic from the days when people still knew how to write travel books.

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Henrik Bering-Jensen

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À SINGLE OIL LAMP sways from the rotting beam and so thick are the mosquitoes round it that it sheds only a pale glow. The table has long ago been devoured by ants and I write on my knees crouching on an empty cask. . . . The governor is sitting in the corner now mechanically dealing out the greasy cards in a game of patience that will never come out because the three of clubs was stolen many years ago by a Portuguese adventurer who needed it for a hand of poker. . . . The missionaries have long forsaken their vows and live openly with native women infecting them with hideous diseases. The medical officer is a leper. … As I write a crocodile snaps viciously at my feet and a cobra coils itself about the pen so I must stop and say good-bye and G.B.Y.”

The letter is dated January 1, 1933, Georgetown Club, British Guiana, and it is signed, not Indiana Jones as you might think, but Evelyn Waugh. In later photos the British satirist hardly fits our standard image of the fearless explorer: small, round, and tweedy, he looks like somebody you would expect to meet at a church sale rather than in the middle of the green hell of Guiana. Between 1928 and 1935, however, Waugh journeyed to the Middle East, Africa, and South America, and out of these travels came no fewer than four books: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Waugh in Abyssinia. In 1945 he selected five long excerpts from these and published them under the title When the Going Was Good. Inspired by the renewed interest in Waugh’s works resulting from the television success of Brideshead Revisited, Little, Brown has now reissued the book in its series of Evelyn Waugh reprints, a commendable initiative, as the book is a classic from the days when people still knew how to write travel books.