Persons of Interest
Posted on May 26th, 2009
by Daniel McCarthy |
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This week the TAC website features a retrospective of some of the most penetrating profiles from our archives: R. J. Stove on Evelyn Waugh, Pat Buchanan interviewing Ralph Nader, Tom Woods on the follies of Woodrow Wilson, Bill Kauffman on Gore Vidal, and many more, including several pieces that have never before been available on-line. See the main page for a complete listing.
The May 18 issue of the print magazine, featuring Michael Desch’s provocative cover story on how we can live with a nuclear Iran, is still in bookstores and features several excellent stories that aren’t on the Web, including essays by Andrew Bacevich and Patrick Allitt. Of course, the best way to get the full TAC experience is to subscribe. And if you’re already a subscriber, consider giving a gift subscription to a friend. You can also make a donation to show your support for TAC — help keep the magazine for thinking conservatives going strong.
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Thank you for making the Waugh piece available, sir!
The Waugh reference reminds me of an anecdote from, I think, one of the editors of National Review, whose secretary took a call from a book critic who had left word of his chosen subject for a review. “He wants to write on Evil and War.”
Robert Fulford mentions another famous Waugh cry:
“In 1928 his first book, Rossetti: His Life and Work, was greeted by a reviewer who showed little enthusiasm and referred to the author as ‘Miss Evelyn Waugh’. The following week, ‘Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh’ appeared in the letters column, acknowledging that people of ‘limited social experience’ believe his first name belongs exclusively to one sex but the dust jacket of his book referred to him as Mr. Waugh ‘for the guidance of unleisured critics.’ This should surely have been noted before the reviewer ‘tumbled into print.’
“Worse was to come, as Derwent May puts it. When Decline and Fall appeared, a brief review said it was sometimes funny but not as funny as it tried to be. Then, at the end of 1929, in an article on another subject, Decline and Fall was called ‘a piece of charming frivolity by Miss Evelyn Waugh.’
Here’s another version from Canadian academic Jeffrey M. Heath, in a 1973 number of the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter:
“Unquestionably, then, [T. Sturge] Moore wrote the well-known and ill-starred review of Rossetti which appeared in T.L.S. (May 10, 1928), p. 341. Moore refers to the author as ‘Miss Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti’s latest biographer,’ and concludes, in classic reviewer’s jargon, ‘Her mental eye is slightly astigmatic, but she is never tedious.’ Little guessing the horrors which lay in wait for him the following week, Moore plunges on to seal his fate: ‘Miss Waugh approaches the “squalid” Rossetti like some dainty Miss of the sixties bringing the Italian organ-grinder a penny, merciless in spite of the best intentions.’
“On May 17 Waugh replied crisply, ‘My Christian name, I know, is occasionally regarded by people of limited social experience as belonging exclusively to one or other sex … surely some … investigation might in merest courtesy have been taken before your reviewer tumbled into print …’ Furthermore, says Waugh, he never applied the word ’squalid’ to Rossetti.”
Here! Here!
On two computers which I’ve tried, the Owen Harries piece about Burke seems to be afflicted with typographical gibberish. Every now and then - whatever character encoding mechanism I use - the following appears on the screen in the middle of a paragraph: “�”. Are others experiencing this difficulty when reading the Harries piece?
The Burke article also contained some strange A’s when viewed on my computer, and that was when viewed with Mozilla Firefox, which is supposed to be the browser best suited to smoothing out HTML weirdness.