The Picadors
On Monday evening three gentlemen interrogated Mr. Evelyn Waugh for half an hour in a BBC programme called " Frankly Speaking." Affability is not among this great novelist's domi- nant characteristics, and it was early appaient to at least one listener that, in the cramped quarters of the studio, the three gentlemen had come to dislike Mr. Waugh. He for his part never quite allowed the stoicism with which he endured their importunities to decline from the orgulous into the exasperated. If he had, I think most listeners would have forgiven him, for I never heard an interview conducted in public on such ill-natured terms. Mr. Waugh had confessed to an early interest in carpentry. " Do you ever do any work with your hands now, Mr. Waugh ? " Mr. Waugh said that he sometimes helped with the harvest. " Do you ever do a full day's work in the harvest field ? " Mr. Waugh said he didn't but (not very convincingly) that he could if he wanted to. More and more Tiled by a bull which refused to charge, the picadors trotted in again and again, prodding him with questions designed to show that he was unfair to the Welfare State, or out of touch with life because he never spoke to people in trains and would not admit the existence of such' a person as the man in the street. Protected only by a vulnerable breastwork of prejudices and convictions, Mr. Waugh stuck to his dandiacal guns; and, although they had the initiative, I thought he emerged with far more credit than the three colourless and curiously uniform voices who prosecuted so relentlessly their purpose of proving that Mr. Waugh is somehow letting down the Common Man.
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