Reassessments
The Abyssinian Waugh
William Deedes
Evelyn Waugh went to Abyssinia in the summer of 1935 as war correspondent for the Daily Mail with two books in mind. One, striking his rich seam as a travel writer, would be mainly serious and about the war. A novel might follow. As it turned out, the first book, Waugh in Abyssinia, possibly disappointed his own and his admirers' expectations. His novel, Scoop, hit the roof. Among our own fraternity in Fleet Street, where we are prone to narcissism, it is readily seen as his greatest work.
Abyssinia had good vibes for Waugh. In 1930 he had prevailed on The Times to send him to Addis Ababa to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie, Lion of Judah. The story goes that he posted his account of this event.
BADLY LEFT ALL PAPERS ALL STORIES. But
the journey inspired his novel Black Mischief which was a success. It was unfortunate, incidentally, that the British Minister in Addis, whose daughter featured as Prudence in Black Mischief, should still be in residence when Waugh returned in 1935. I witnessed the reunion of Waugh and Prudence' in one of the capital's two dreadful cinema clubs, and it is the only time I have seen a woman dash a glass of champagne in a man's face.
Nature is pretty fair in her distribution of the talents. She will endow a politician of outstanding intellect with bad judgment; a poetic genius with a touch of dipsomania She determined that Waugh should be a superb novelist and a very had reporter. How else could the rest of us scratch a living? How otherwise would we have got Scoop? Living alongside him in the Deutsches Haus, which in Scoop became Pension Dressler, one got wind of the telegrams he received from an anguished Daily Mail. His comic telegrams in Scoop are emasculated versions of what arrived at frequent intervals from Northcliffe House. He used them as spills when indulging his frightful habit of smoking a short cigar at the breakfast table. If Waugh had disappointed The Times, he dismayed the Daily Mail.
it must be borne in mind that this Abyssinian affair was the last of its kind. The later Sino-Japanese war was of a different genre. So was the Spanish Civil War. That for some of our craft was not a story but a crusade. Later they wrote books on how they had borne arms against Franco. Abyssinia was the last war to attract the circus. Fox Movietone sent Lawrence Stallings, famed and flamboyant author of those first World war hits What Price Glory? and The Big Parade, to head their outfit. The Westerns were unlucky to miss him. He and his gang got off rather lightly, I thought, in Scoop as Excelsior Movie-Sound Expeditionary Unit to the Ishmaelite Ideological Front. Indeed, looking back on that galere, nearly all ghosts now, I feel moved to say that Waugh was charitable. One of our circle, a Texan, who does not feature in the novel, appeared in London some months after we all got back. He wore boots laced to the knee, a canary-coloured waistcoat, two cameras and a gigantic Stetson hat. As we parted in my office he wondered if I could put him in touch with Waugh. I directed him to Waugh's club and this must have come off, for a day or two later I received a card which read simply: 'That was not kind. E.W.'
It would not be fair, even at this distance from the 40-year rule, too closely to identify; but among the characters in Scoop can be traced Knickerbocker of Hearst's International News Service, Jim Mills of Associated Press, Sir Percival Phillips, veteran correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, Tovey, a Daily Express photographer, Drees of Exchange Telegraph, some wild Frenchmen whose names I forget, George Steer of The Times. I contributed, marginally, to William Boot's extraordinary baggage. The Morning Post thought it right that their correspondent should travel as a gentleman. Breeches, tropical suits and a variety of equatorial hats came with me, some of it in two uniform cases (stamped with my name) and a vast cedar-wood trunk lined with zinc to defy white ants. In Paris I paid for 294 lbs excess baggage. When this lot arrived in the Deutsches Haus, Waugh was enchanted. The cleft sticks were his own idea.
Holed up in Addis Ababa, first awaiting the war and then denied access to its main front, the spirit of the circus infected us all, including Waugh. There was, for example, one evening when after friendly poker Knickerbocker opined that Waugh and Aldous Huxley were the best contemporary writers. Waugh took this qualified acknowledgement of his pre-eminence as fighting words. He invited Knickerbocker to step outside the hotel where as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I found myself holding Knickerbocker's spectacles while they sparred in pitch darkness. No —and this is the odd thing — all of us were sober.
Though apparently impervious to the Daily Mail's despairing telegrams, Waugh was not idle. He enjoyed more than one long interview with the Abuna, whose news value was negligible, and paid this pillar of the church the compliment of naming his pet monkey `13'Abuna'. He discovered rich and ancient corners, such as the walled city of Harar, with joy and thoroughness. Many characters he drew for Scoop are' as I say, even at this distance recognisable, (I never met Lord Copper or his foreign editor, Salter, but with recollections of Fleet Street in the early 1930s I have no difficulty at all in placing them.) More surprisinglY, the plot he drew, though bizarre, had 3 strong substratum of reality. As they travelled by Messageries Maritimes to Africa (mercifully, a boat ahead of me) Waugh and his warwarding companions were joined at Port Said by a mysterious individual named F.W. Rickett. They took note of his mysteriousness but failed to discover until it was too late the reason for it. Rickett was to sign an agree' ment with the Emperor on behalf of 3 subsidiary of Standard Vacuum Oil, giving oil and mineral rights over half the king;; .dom. The quid pro quo was to be a 0" million Modernisation programme. The night the agreement was signed in Addis Ababa Waugh was many miles awl' exploring the ancient glories of Harar. ett's story was scooped up by two col' respondents, Jim Mills of AP and Sir Per" cival Phillips of the Daily Telegraph. Mills cabled the entire agreement to America' Washington, thus suddenly drawn into an oncoming war, was aghast. The world was, staggered. Eden, Laval of France, Cordell Hull, America's Secretary of State, cOnsulted furiously and contrived to bust the deal. By any standards, Mills and PhilliPs had pulled off an astonishing scoop. Angll cables descended on all the other e°1' respondents, but none more heavily than the Daily Mail's on Waugh, still in Hog and out of touch. In Scoop this plot is, so..,t° speak, inverted, with the mysterious mr Baldwin playing the role of Rickett. 'Lightly as I took my duties and the pretensions of my colleagues . . . ' Waugh was to write later. So he did. Yet is is not in the nature of man to work alongside Pr°' fessionals in any field, however oddly theY behave, without feeling at times a cella° wistfulness. Often I have wondered since how much such feelings may have stirred in Waugh. For in the end William Boot, his hero, came good. Lord Copper was right:, Boot, from hopeless beginnings, scoopeu the world.
The general editor looked . 'It's news' he said. 'Stop the machines at Man' chester and Glasgow. Clear the line t° Belfast and Paris. Scrap the whole front page. Kill the ex-Beauty Queen's pauper funeral. Get in a photograph of Boot.'
A touch of yearning there? Insidei many reporters a novelist struggles to ge out. Inside Waugh, with all his scorn for us' there could have been, who knows, a rePciri tel wriggling about. Seeing what we g° from Waugh instead, how very lucky we are that it didn't work out that way.
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