Casting back to the blog from two days ago, which was based on an unnamed article, which is “What Waugh Saw in America” from the magazine America‘s Spring 2020 literary review edition. It’s worth a read. Here are a few more thoughts.
Consistent with remarks of my blog contrasting Lolita as a novel with Cuties as a film, one of the problems Waugh found with Hollywood film was that a book that published “a mere 5,000 copies” could shape a culture, but a film needs to placate and entertain the masses. In a 1947 journalistic article, he feared artists would “be seduced [in Hollywood] to their own extinction.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s premature death working for the film industry might bear out Waugh’s analysis. William Faulkner had more success and productivity as a novelist-turned-screenwriter. Though not mentioned in my book (which ends with Samuel Beckett), contemporary Irish playwrights like Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh have succeeded toggling between stage and screen.
With the virus keeping people away from live theaters, movies give playwrights more incentive to become screenwriters whose work can be streamed into peoples’ homes. This only furthers trends toward screen and away from stage and page that technology and perhaps educational and moral failures had instigated long before.
The article on Waugh finds that part of the acidic satire of The Loved One comes from the author playing on the cliché of Englishmen as the world’s former foremost imperialists “exiled in the barbarous regions of the world” by suggesting one such barbarous place is Hollywood. The novel notes Americans “don’t expect you to listen” and “nothing they say is designed to be heard.” It reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote in my book to the effect that if the English could be taught to speak and Irish to listen, a good conversation might result.