{"id":90039,"date":"2015-09-22T16:36:53","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T20:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=90039"},"modified":"2015-09-22T16:36:53","modified_gmt":"2015-09-22T20:36:53","slug":"great-rot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/22\/great-rot\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Rot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/O9IinGHntTs\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Little did you know, when you woke up today on this rather ordinary Tuesday, that a treat awaited you. I speak, of course, of the above clip, in which Evelyn Waugh critiques modernism.<\/p>\n<p>No one ever made the mistake of confusing the Waugh of the 1950s with a progressive: by this point, he was fully inhabiting the role of an outspoken, old-guard crank, as loudly disillusioned with modernity and its art as he was by the Church of England. And yet! Even so, one is not\u00a0<em>quite<\/em>\u00a0prepared for his strident tone.\u00a0He refers to Gertrude Stein as an author of \u201c<em>absolute<\/em>\u00a0gibberish\u201d; James Joyce, that \u201cpoor, dotty Irishman,\u201d is a producer of \u201cgreat rot.\u201d Between takes, apparently, Waugh sexually harassed his interviewer, Elizabeth Jane Howard.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Longer\u2014but no less entertaining\u2014is Waugh\u2019s notorious 1953 appearance on the BBC program\u00a0<em>Frankly Speaking<\/em>. It\u2019s apparently held up as<em> \u201c<\/em>one of the most ill-natured interviews ever,\u201d at least according to a quote\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/mediacentre\/proginfo\/2015\/12\/frankly-speaking-evelyn-waugh\">one keeps reading<\/a>. But exactly who considered it such, I can\u2019t say. In any case, it apparently traumatized the author\u2014he fictionalized the episode in\u00a0<em>The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold<\/em>\u2014and it\u2019s certainly uncomfortable watching, even sixty years later.\u00a0Waugh is no less cranky, but one can\u2019t help but feel for him under the barrage of questions from no fewer than three interviewers\u2014which was, indeed, the show\u2019s rather hostile format. Well, that\u2019s perhaps putting it a bit strongly. After all, Waugh does say, at one point,\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t think one wants too much character in a woman\u2019s face, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UvtjUt0GzKg\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review<em>, and the <\/em>Daily<em>\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Little did you know, when you woke up today on this rather ordinary Tuesday, that a treat awaited you. I speak, of course, of the above clip, in which Evelyn Waugh critiques modernism. No one ever made the mistake of confusing the Waugh of the 1950s with a progressive: by this point, he was fully [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[2300,5764,3292,1132,947,4524,7214],"class_list":["post-90039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-bbc","tag-evelyn-waugh","tag-gertrude-stein","tag-interviews","tag-james-joyce","tag-modernism","tag-videos"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Evelyn Waugh on the Modernists: \u201cGreat Rot\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein revisits some of Waugh\u2019s truculent TV interviews\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/22\/great-rot\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Great Rot by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 22, 2015 \u2013 Little did you know, when you woke up today on this rather ordinary Tuesday, that a treat awaited you. 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