Scoop – Evelyn Waugh, 1938 ★★

Fleet Street Follies

When it came to media bashing, Evelyn Waugh got his licks in early and often. Scoop is his acid take on the artful folly of foreign correspondents competing for the big story, not really caring if it isn’t there.

Based on his recent experience as a war correspondent covering the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia), Waugh presents Ishmaelia, an East African land of no cultural or material importance. Here is sent, completely by accident, one William Boot, nature correspondent for the Beast.

Can this gormless rustic bumpkin accustomed to writing about great-crested grebes possibly land the big story? To quote Mr. Salter, a toady to the Beast’s overbearing publisher Lord Copper, “Up to a point.”

Lord Copper’s instructions to William set the stage for one of Waugh’s most beloved satirical romps:

“What the British public wants first, last and all the time is News. Remember that the Patriots are in the right and are going to win. The Beast stands by them four-square. But they must win quickly. The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side, and a colourful entry into the capital. That is the Beast policy for the war.”

Lord Beaverbrook, publisher of the Daily Express for many decades, is widely considered a model for Lord Copper, though Waugh himself wrote for the rival Daily Mail during his brief time as a war correspondent. Beaverbrook's power was so great he wound up Minister of Aircraft Production during World War II.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Aitken,_1st_Baron_Beaverbrook

As a hypothesis, Scoop is far-sighted, clever, and quite funny. As a story, it’s lacking. Of all Waugh’s novels, it figures the one that connects with so many brilliant people and gives readers a fairly happy ending by Waugh standards is the one that leaves me cold.

The novel starts out brilliantly, and familiarly for regular Waugh readers. Josephine Stitch, a classic upper-class caricature who can’t be bothered keeping her automobile off the sidewalk when she’s in a hurry, gets an urgent request from a young friend. John Courtney Boot needs to get away from England so he can dodge an unhappy love affair.

As he is a noted novelist just back from Patagonia, John is recommended to Lord Copper to cover a spot of brewing unrest in Ishmaelia. Only somewhere along the line Boots get crossed, and thus William the nature writer gets the assignment, despite his keen desire to remain at home with his aging, eccentric relatives.

This is one of Waugh’s most widely quoted novels; even William’s bosky prose style (“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole”) is memorably sent up. The book is always taking the micky out of some dignitary or institution, especially when William meets the other members of the press after reaching Ishmaelia.

British war correspondents in Ethiopia, circa 1935. "There are two invariable rules for a special correspondent," William Boot is told by Lord Copper. "Travel Light, and Be Prepared."
Image from https://www.evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-134/index.html

“You know, when I first started in journalism I used to think that foreign correspondents spoke every language under the sun and spent their lives studying international conditions,” recalls a wire-service reporter named Corker. “Brother, look at us!”

Corker is William’s guide to the rules of the game, although not before Corker tries to misdirect the new guy at their first meeting. Colleagues, not friends is one of the rules. So is making stories up if one can’t be found honestly.

When one reporter wires a sensational story, the others wait breathlessly for his exposure. If it turns out true, they know angry editors will demand explanations about how they got scooped.

The nation of Ishmaelia is not absent of interest; it only looks that way. Waugh explains: An inhospitable race of squireens cultivate the highlands and pass their days in the perfect leisure which those peoples alone enjoy who are untroubled by the speculative or artistic itch.

Who was the real William Boot? Many say it was W. F. Deedes, a famous British politician who travelled with Waugh in Abyssinia and, like Boot, carried a lot of luggage. Others suggest William Beach Thomas (above), a decorated war correspondent in World War I whose prose was distinguished by love of nature.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beach_Thomas 

The ruling class is a sprawling family by the name of Jackson, but plots are underway to overthrow them. One group wants to make Ishmaelia communist; another, the White Shirts, are fascist and actually claim to be Aryan, not black, despite external appearances. Neither takeover is in the British interest, which would just as soon keep the status quo.

For the British, as for most other European powers, Waugh writes, “the one thing less desirable than seeing a neighbour established there, was the trouble of taking it themselves.”

For me, Ishmaelia is a point of contention. In his earlier novel, Black Mischief, Waugh went to great trouble detailing his island nation of Azania, its warring factions, its strangely inert leader, even the design of a royal seal. But in Scoop, apart from a shifty bureaucrat named Dr. Benito, a few foreigners making a living, and an ornery milch-goat, the country is consciously left blank:

Until a few months before William Boot’s departure, no one in Europe knew of the deep currents that were flowing in Ishmaelite politics; nor did many people know of them in Ishmaelia.

In 1987 Scoop was adapted for British television with Michael Maloney as William Boot. It's an nondescript production that struggles with the lack of narrative cohesion in the source material, but doesn't land the humor as well. Denholm Elliott has the best of it as Salter in a late-career role.
Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093931/

It’s not a valid criticism to say one aspect of a novel is not as good as the same aspect of another novel. But after the one-liners, the witty banter, and the marvelous way Waugh turns a phrase, there isn’t much of anything to distract a reader from a resolutely empty setting.

Most aspects of Scoop are either pointless, predictable, or both. William meets a beautiful Nordic woman, Kätchen. She has a plan for offloading some rocks that belong to a man who she claims has deserted her. We discover she is a bit of a schemer, hitting up William for access to his unending expense account while William still processes what seems his first-ever sexual experience.

“So this is what we will do. You shall buy them and then, when my husband comes back and says they are worth more than twenty pounds, you will pay him the difference. There will be nothing wrong in that, will there? He could not be angry?”

“No, I don’t think he could possibly be angry about that.”

Falling in love for the first time ends badly for Willam, and for a while, seems to force a kind of maturing of his character, enough at least to stand up to Dr. Benito at a critical point. But for the most part, he remains inept in his trade, in need of being bailed out by others.

The news from Ishmaelia William stumbles into is splashed over the front page of the Beast while rival papers are left in the dust. One oddity of Scoop is that we never learn about the impact of the news back home, or why its seen as important, except that it gets big headlines.
Image from https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/396421270028

The ending itself is especially dogeared. A character we barely met earlier in the book turns up to help resolve the Ishmaelia situation and spirit William back to England, to return to his old garden column job, paid off by Mr. Salter and otherwise forgotten and dispirited:

“I’ve felt an ass for weeks. Ever since I went to London. I’ve been treated an ass.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Salter sadly. “That’s what we are paid for.”

Then there is what can be called an after-ending, something Waugh did well in A Handful Of Dust (Tony Last’s relatives taking over Hetton Abbey is a lovely, ironic grace note). In Scoop, it comes off as padding. William’s doddering relatives and their crumbling estate are explored again for an extended period, and Waugh does extract some plot value from them, but central players through most of the narrative, whether they be Kätchen, Dr. Benito, or Corker and the rest of the foreign press, are discarded.

William Boot's hometown is much like this 1946 illustration, far away from bustling London, where a weary traveler is more likely to find a wagon than a taxi. "Sap ran thin and slow," Waugh writes, "a gusty night always brought down a litter of dead timber."
Painting by S. R. Badmin from https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1204 

Waugh could always be funny, and he is here, but for the first time since Vile Bodies he seemed content to do no more. He has his perspective on British journalists overseas, and it’s a memorable one, but stretched out to absurd lengths.

Knowing some background of Waugh’s time in Africa probably soured me on this book. In late 1935 he proved a poor war correspondent in Abyssinia; then he went home and wrote a travel book about his time that all but rejoiced in the Italian invasion. He wasn’t taking the popular line in that struggle, for sure, just as William remains aloof from his fellow reporters in Scoop, who act the part of sheep and wind up sent off in the desert by Benito seeking a town that doesn’t exist.

“Hitchcock’s story has broken. He’s at the Fascist headquarters scooping the world.”

“Where?”

“Town called Laku.”

“But he can’t be. Bannister told me there was no such place.”

“Well there is now, old boy.”

In 1937, the year before Scoop's publication, Waugh married Laura Herbert, a union which would last the rest of his life. They had seven children. This may have been Waugh's contented and profitable period, but it would be interrupted by World War II.
Photo by Fred Morley from https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/evelyn-waugh-a-life-revisited-by-philip-eade-review-a3279486.html

My biggest problem with Scoop is that it is half a great novel. The set up is involving, well plotted, and as amusing to read now as it was then. He looks in on Lord Copper’s office at the Beast, where “the carpets were thicker here, the lights softer, the expressions of the inhabitants more care-worn.”

William’s arrival in Ishmaelia continues the premise of press ineptitude with several funny scenes if less formidable characters. We learn how the press file stories, with short telegrams like “ADEN UNWARWISE” which are fleshed out by copy editors back home into full-blown adventure stories.

For all his inventiveness, Waugh isn’t very engaged in his creation. But Scoop’s premise of ridiculing media ineptitude has endured, and along with its brilliant early satire, has given it a prominence in the author’s legacy impossible to deny.