Finally watched Stephen Fry and Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things. I wasn’t expecting such strong flashbacks to my own childhood in the Disco Era, but we also had a world that had undergone drastic social upheaval followed by an economic crisis, beautiful social butterflies who didn’t quite know what to do with themselves, and traumatized older veterans who spent their time being furious at the youths instead of dealing with their own problems. And then that “Saved By the War” ending – well, I suppose it was historically accurate and an improvement on Waugh’s original. Early to mid 20th Century literature was all too often dunked in nihilism, and washing some of that off can’t hurt.

— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

evelynwaughblack:

❝It is wrong to constrain political thought, even bad political thought. And if the targets of political correctness have changed over the years, its power over what gets printed, heard, or seen has not.

This may, in fact, be more a problem now than then.

England has no written constitution, and therefore no First Amendment. But even if there had been a British Bill of Rights it would have offered no protection to Orwell in this matter.

The First Amendment does not require a publisher to print anything the publisher doesn’t want to—because publishers have rights, too. If a law were passed prohibiting the expression of certain views, it would be held unconstitutional. But political correctness is not a law. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Its victims have no constitutional protections. And even today it prevents the expression of uncomfortable truths more effectively than any statute ever could.

If Orwell were with us today, he would probably welcome the Internet blogs as an alternative to the mainstream political correctness that almost kept him from print. (He would have faulted the blogs on other grounds.)

Of course, Orwell is with us today, but that was a very close call ❞

David Lebedoff, The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love & War, 2008

Evelyn Waugh had his faults, as a man and as a writer, but he sure knew how to wield an adverb to good effect. This example is from Decline and Fall.

The Hotel Metropole, Cympryddyg, is by far the grandest hotel in the north of Wales. It is situated on a high and healthy eminence overlooking the strip of water that railway companies have gallantly compared to the Bay of Naples.

That word gallantly is doing a surprising amount of work here. It makes it clear that the strip of water bears no resemblance to the Bay of Naples, and allows us to imagine the dreary marine outlook from the Hotel Metropole without the need for the author to describe it at all.

I’d never suggest that sticking an adverb into a sentence will necessarily improve it, any more than taking one out would. It is the choice of the exact word that makes Waugh’s description work here. Substituting ‘inaccurately’ or 'disingenuously’ might be more accurate, but it would not achieve the same effect. The connotations of gallantry, implicitly comparing the railway companies’ description to a young man’s insincere compliments ('How ravishing you look tonight, Countess’), or the gracious surrender of a seat on a bus ('You poor old chap, do take my seat’), are enough to evoke the relationship between the commercial interests of the railway and the town of Cympryddyg.

I wonder whether the shape of the word came into play too. The -llan- in the middle looks very Welsh. Possibly I’m reading too much into this – Waugh isn’t James Joyce.

(Perhaps a Welsh speaker can confirm that Cympryddyg is pronounced roughly the way an English person would say 'Come, prithee’.)

Decline and Fall was Waugh’s first published novel. A promising start, you might say.

— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited