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Waugh Of The World

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"Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveler and not a tourist." (Labels, 1930) Throughout his first full decade as a novelist, Evelyn Waugh kept up a second career as a writer of travel books, getting double-duty from the locales he used to spruce up his fiction. "Waugh Abroad" collects the five travel books he wrote in the 1930s, as well as brief essay on holy places from 1952 and a last travel book published in 1960, six years before his death. For Waugh aficionados like me, "Waugh Abroad" is required reading, especially since three of the books, "Remote People" (1931), "Ninety-Two Days" (1934), and "Waugh In Abyssinia" (1936) detail travels Waugh used for setting his novels "Black Mischief", "Handful Of Dust", and "Scoop," respectively. What you get is a vast sampling of Waugh at near his best as a writer as well as at his very worst. That's true from the very first book, "Labels." In his introduction, Nicholas Shakespeare calls it the "best of his travel books," and though I don't agree, it's certainly his most accessible, featuring Waugh aboard a Norwegian passenger ship for an extended Mediterranean jaunt. Waugh fills the canvas in an entertaining way, from encountering a Naples pimp ("All-a-girls naked. Vair artistic, vair smutty, vair French") to the then-young architecture of Gaudi in Barcelona, which entrances the young conservative to some of his finest descriptive prose. Then you get Waugh the embarrassing snob, sniffing at Muslim art and expressing British superiority with less nuance than he ever did in his fiction. "Remote People" is even worse in this respect, and "Waugh In Abyssinia" gasp-inducing. In fact, Waugh's African visits point up the thin line between racialism and racism all-too-well; Waugh writing for pages about the land and the politics while giving short shrift to the people. At least "Abyssinia" showcases Waugh's misanthropy to far better advantage in discussing the tenuous link between factual accuracy and the press. He used this same focus in his novel "Scoop," but it comes off to better effect here: "We could retail their lies, even when we found them most palpable, with the qualification, 'It is stated in some quarters' or 'I was unofficially informed.'" Only "Ninety-Two Days," informed by Waugh's new Catholicism and a sense of curiosity for the vast mystery of British Guiana, really holds together well from beginning to end as a record of Waugh engaging himself in a specific locale and its people, investing you in the experience the same way he pulls you into the fictional world of "Brideshead Revisited." Writing of the jungle, "the tartarean plunge on entering the forest and of the bird-like sense of liberation on leaving it," Waugh makes you feel the sweat and mosquito bites. Too bad it's only part of "Waugh Abroad." You also get Waugh's take on Mexican socialism in 1939, "Robbery Under Law," which manages to transform a perfectly sound argument into a repetitive screed and is much worse than "A Tourist In Africa," a tired though occasionally shimmering final outing for Waugh's travel-writing, nowhere more so than when he writes of the folly of Rhodesian apartheid, "that preposterous frontier," which shows quite a different Waugh than you might imagine from reading the other books here. Though never dull, Waugh is writing here for a more transitory audience, and it shows.

What Waugh Saw...

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I purchased Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing : The Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh because I was looking for a copy of ROBBERY UNDER THE LAW by Waugh and that book was contained in this collection. Waugh's travel writing is informative and comical. He tells it as he sees it in that mid-20th century English style. There is a little bit of the "We've got an empire to look after" attitude in Waugh's travel writing. But, that is a small price to pay for Waugh's analysis of world events and how they affected the countries he visited. His writing is insightful and he does a good job of describing travelling, geography, history, and the good and bad folks within and without of the places he visited. When you finish one of Waugh's travel books you feel like you have visited the country or area with him. This book is a good read and should be on the shelf of all those who enjoy good travel writing.

A Welcome Return

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All of Waugh's travel books have been out of print for years, with the exception of brief excerpts he included in an anthology called "When the Going Was Good." (Which is well worth reading if for nothing other than Waugh's caustic preface.) Even then one of his travelogues, "Robbery Under Law," was not excerpted at all. "Waugh Abroad" changes that, and God Bless Everyman's Library for bringing all these books back in print in their completeness. For Waugh used his travels as a source for much of his fiction, and much of his private life--particularly his disasterous first marriage--is chronicled pseudononymously as well (see "Labels"). Aficionados of the novel "Scoop" will easily recognize the "real" events portrayed in "Waugh in Abyssinia". "Robbery Under Law" is particularly interesting, not merely for it's prior rarity but because it features Waugh at his most bilious--full of invective and outright hatred for the anti-Catholic Socialist dictatorship then in power in 1940's Mexico. Yet these books feature not only Waugh at his best, they also show him at his worst: long winded and occasionally boring, something he very, very rarely was in fiction, but is more often in these travel books. But great treasures lie within.