… How Evelyn Waugh’s ‘cantankerous’ Catholicism clashed with America’s literary scene at a dinner party in Florence. (Hat tip, Dave. Lull.)
One example of his appalling rudeness will be more than sufficient. A friendly American told him how much she had enjoyed his novel Brideshead Revisited, whereupon he rolled his eyes and replied: “I thought it was good myself, but now I know that a vulgar, common American woman like you admires it, I’m not so sure.”
I love the story about how Waugh sat next to a man on a train who reading one of his humorous novels. For several hours, the man kept turning the pages of Waugh's novel and never once cracked a smile of laughed. Waugh was furious but said nothing to the man. It was Waugh himself who satirized his own awful character in "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold." A very clever and laugh out loud novel. My favorite Waugh novel is "Scoop," in which there is a mix up between a famous war reporter and a part-time gardening writer with the same name. The editor in error sends the gardening writer to cover a war. Years later, we discovered that the most absurd elements of the novel were in fact true.
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