Those of us who have been cashing in on the centenary of Evelyn Waugh’s birth, which falls on 28 October, have had a good year. Stephen Fry has won acclaim for his direction of the film based on Waugh’s Vile Bodies, renamed — on orders from the marketing men, I guess — Bright Young Things. Michael Johnston has attracted attention by writing an unauthorised sequel to Brideshead Revisited, which at the behest of the Waugh estate will be available only on the Internet.
My own account of adventures with Waugh in Abyssinia during Mussolini’s war in 1935 has sold more copies than I would expect any book of mine to sell. Nicholas Rankin, who has written a book about George Steer, the underrated correspondent of the Times in Abyssinia with us, and later the first to report the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, has had a success. Strangest of all, Warner Brothers felt it could do sufficiently without Waugh’s central theme which is, to quote his own words, ‘the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters’. ‘If God can be said to exist in my version,’ boasts Andrew Davies, who is writing the script, ‘he would be the villain.’ Hamlet without the ghost, indeed, but there are no flies on Warner Bros, who know well enough that what sets cash tills ringing is not a film’s merit or its faithfulness to the original author but the amount of publicity it can generate in advance. They’ll pack the cinemas to see Waugh traduced.
But it’s well to be clear about one thing as this centenary draws near. Long after some of us have feasted off the Waugh harvest, have gone to dust and are forgotten, his books will be read and admired.
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