Scoop

Footnotes to myself

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh

I rarely read fiction, but I adore Waugh - along with Graham Greene. I have a small collection of Penguins of both, which I love picking up from secondhand bookshops etc. This was the latest purchase; I’ve made no effort to read his more famous novels first.

The bells of St Bride’s chimed unheard in the customary afternoon din of the Megalopolitan Building. The country edition had gone to bed; below traffic-level, in grotto-blue light, leagues of paper ran noisily through the machines; overhead, where floor upon floor rose from the dusk of the streets to the clear air of day, ground-glass doors opened and shut; figures in frayed and perished braces popped in and out; on a hundred lines reporters talked at cross purposes; sub-editors busied themselves with their humdrum task of reducing to blank nonsense the sheaves of misinformation which whistling urchins piled before them; beside a hundred typewriters soggy biscuits lay in a hundred tepid saucers. At the hub and still centre of all this animation, Lord Copper sat alone in splendid tranquillity. His massive head, empty of thought, rested in sculptural fashion upon his left fist. He began to draw a little cow on his writing pad.

Waugh really is marvellous at building atmosphere, in particular frantic energy or contemplative silence. This, I thought, was a marvellous combination of both.

Mr Salter was not in fighting form and he knew it. The strength was gone out of him. He was dirty and blistered and aching in every limb, cold sober and unsuitably dressed. He was in a strange country. These people were not his people nor their laws his. He felt like a Roman legionary, heavily armed, weighted with the steel and cast brass of civilization, tramping through forests beyond the Roman pale, harassed by silent, illusive savages, the vanguard of an advance that had pushed too far and lost touch with the base... or was he the abandoned rearguard of a retreat; had the legions sailed?

I also love Greene and Hemingway for the same reason I love Waugh; they capture masculine senses better than any writers I have ever come across. What man has never felt like this?