Evelyn Waugh wouldn’t be caught dead at your dinner party.
Waugh, one of my favorite misanthropic bastards in literary history, put a lot of effort into putting as much distance between himself & the rest of humanity as possible. To that end, he went to the trouble of printing up these all-purpose “Mr. Evelyn Waugh is not interested in your petty invitations and cordially invites you to fuck off” cards, which he would hand out to people who made demands on him (e.g. aspiring writers seeking critiques of their manuscripts, friends requesting his presence at dinner parties, his children asking him to stop publicly referring to them as “physically inept, monotonous, defective adults who fill me with depression”)
(via trumpetstrumpet)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh wouldn’t be caught dead at your dinner party.
Waugh, one of my favorite misanthropic bastards in literary history, put a lot of effort into putting as much distance between himself & the rest of humanity as possible. To that end, he went to the trouble of printing up these all-purpose “Mr. Evelyn Waugh is not interested in your petty invitations and cordially invites you to fuck off” cards, which he would hand out to people who made demands on him (e.g. aspiring writers seeking critiques of their manuscripts, friends requesting his presence at dinner parties, his children asking him to stop publicly referring to them as “physically inept, monotonous, defective adults who fill me with depression”)
I like this convenient, good-for-all-occasions way of rebuffing unwanted requests and am considering printing my own set of “Miss Fresherhells greatly regrets that she cannot do what you so kindly suggest” cards. Just reviewing this morning’s events, I can think of several people to whom I could’ve given a card. For example, my boss, who stated, “I expect you to take this seriously” regarding analyzing a script which features a wise-cracking cat who freebases cocaine & has AIDS as the male lead, to the gentleman who lives on the 42nd St. subway platform and likes to greet me with a joyous, “Hey, Bootylicious! Swing it! Swing what your momma gave you!”
(via trumpetstrumpet)
Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris - all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies…
brideshead revisited evelyn waugh
It is perhaps unsurprising, given that Evelyn Waugh writes so vividly of the drinking and debauchery of Oxford in the 1920’s, that he left university with only a Third. When asked if he played any sports for his college, he famously replied that he “drank for Hertford”. Waugh went on to use his university time in an unconventional but nevertheless productive way, drawing heavily on his experiences there to write the novels ‘Decline and Fall’ and ‘Brideshead Revisited’. Now known as one of the best novelists of the twentieth century, Waugh can’t have felt too bad about his rather uninspiring examination performances.
(Cambridge Tab, trying to reassure us all that a Third isn’t necessarily the end of the world)
Hotty from History #23- Evelyn Waugh (28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966)
- When he was at Hertford college, Oxford, Waugh would rarely be seen without a snifter of brandy or a flute of champagne. When asked if he did anything for his college, he replied “I drink.” Followers should be reminded that at the time Waugh was at University, binge drinking was not such a fashion and was reserved for bohemian intellectuals and those from the titillating twenties that put the ‘art’ into party.
- Before worming his way into the Literary world, Waugh did not make much of a success of himself. He left Oxford without a degree and was fired from a job for seducing the matron. Lucky her.
- He tried to remove Salvador Dali’s moustache, thinking it was joke. In the modern day, this is probably equivalent to removing Karl Lagerfeld’s sunglasses.
- He was fluid with is sexuality, and had a number of relationships with men during his youth. His older brother Alec was actually kicked out of school for publishing a novel, The Loom of Youth (during his school years!), which focused on gay relationships. The Waugh’s are idols for artists everywhere who have discovered their sexuality and struggled to be open about it in the art world, and we admire him for his ability to survive the hideous levels of homophobia that were rife at that time.
- He had seven children. As we all know, men become about five times hotter when they are holding a baby. Also…seven children? That’s a hell of a lot of loin fruit. Evelyn Waugh’s loins…we salute you.
- Waugh’s work was summarised by Time magazine as “a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that, in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world.” So yes, Waugh was a big snob, but in the best possible way. It was Waugh that mourned the loss of the cucumber sandwich laid out on willow pattern plates, the hereditary and compulsory British taste for tea and the careful mannerisms which non Brits usually refer to as ‘uptight’ but this blogger believes is simply a reflection of our unique discerning qualities.
- Thanks to the TV adaptation of his novel, Brideshead Revisited, we all got to see Jeremy Irons involved in homo erotica and being artfully semi naked in various idyllic situations.
- Waugh’s brilliant literary legacy+Jeremy Irons semi naked= happy hottiesfromhistory bloggers.
-Georgia
In honour of me beginning to watch the Brideshead miniseries.
I ought to watch Bright Young Things again.
