 Jacket of the first UK edition | |
| Author | Evelyn Waugh |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Chapman & Hall |
Publication date | 1938 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Preceded by | A Handful of Dust |
| Followed by | Put Out More Flags |
| Text | Scoop online |
Scoop is a 1938 novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. It is a satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents.
William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty, far from the iniquities of London, contributes nature notes to Lord Copper's Daily Beast, a national daily newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent, when the editors mistake him for John Courteney Boot, a fashionable novelist and a remote cousin. He is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on the crisis there.
Lord Copper believes it "a very promising little war" and proposes "to give it fullest publicity". Despite his total ineptitude, Boot accidentally gets the journalistic "scoop" of the title. When he returns, the credit goes to the other Boot and William is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief.
The novel is partly based on Waugh's experience of working for the Daily Mail , when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia, later known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (October 1935 to May 1936). When he got a scoop on the invasion, he telegraphed the story back in Latin for secrecy but they discarded it. [1] Waugh wrote up his travels more factually in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), which complements Scoop.
Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, has been said to be an amalgam of Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook: a character so fearsome that his obsequious foreign editor, Mr Salter, can never openly disagree with him, answering "Definitely, Lord Copper" and "Up to a point, Lord Copper" in place of "yes" or "no". Lord Copper's idea of the lowliest of his employees is a book reviewer. The historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote, "I have Evelyn Waugh's authority for stating that Lord Beaverbrook was not the original of Lord Copper." [2] Bill Deedes thought that the portrait of Copper exhibited the folie de grandeur of Rothermere and Beaverbrook and included "the ghost of Rothermere's elder brother, Lord Northcliffe. Before he died tragically, deranged and attended by nurses, Northcliffe was already exhibiting some of Copper's eccentricities—his megalomania, his habit of giving ridiculous orders to underlings". [3]
It is widely believed that Waugh based his protagonist, William Boot, on Deedes, a junior reporter who arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22, with "a quarter of a ton of baggage". [4] In his memoir At War with Waugh, Deedes wrote that: "Waugh like most good novelists drew on more than one person for each of his characters. He drew on me for my excessive baggage—and perhaps for my naivety...." He further observed that Waugh was reluctant to acknowledge models, so that with Black Mischief's portrait of a young ruler, "Waugh insisted, as he usually did, that his portrait of Seth, Emperor of Azania, was not drawn from any real person such as Haile Selassie". [5] According to Peter Stothard, a more direct model for Boot may have been William Beach Thomas, "a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent". [6]
The novel is full of all but identical opposites: Lord Copper of The Beast, Lord Zinc of the Daily Brute (the Daily Mail and Daily Express ); the CumReds and the White Shirts, parodies of Communists (comrades) and Black Shirts (fascists) etc. [3]
Other models for characters (again, according to Deedes): "Jakes is drawn from John Gunther of the Chicago Daily News . In [one] excerpt, Jakes is found writing, 'The Archbishop of Canterbury who, it is well known, is behind Imperial Chemicals...' Authentic Gunther." [7] The most recognisable figure from Fleet Street is Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, Waugh's portrait of Sir Percival Phillips, working then for The Daily Telegraph. [8] Mrs Stitch is partly based on Lady Diana Cooper, Mr Baldwin is a combination of Francis Rickett and Antonin Besse. Waugh's despised Oxford tutor C. R. M. F. Cruttwell makes his customary cameo appearance, as General Cruttwell. [9]
One of the points of the novel is that even if there is little news happening, the world's media descending requires that something happen to please their editors and owners back home and so they will create news. [10]
Christopher Hitchens, introducing the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of Scoop, said "[i]n the pages of Scoop we encounter Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather" and noted: "The manners and mores of the press, are the recurrent motif of the book and the chief reason for its enduring magic...this world of callousness and vulgarity and philistinism...Scoop endures because it is a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page ." [11]
Scoop was included in The Observer's list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. [12] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Scoop No. 75 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. [13]
In 1972, Scoop was made into a BBC serial: it was adapted by Barry Took, and starred Harry Worth as William Boot and James Beck as Corker.
In 1987, William Boyd adapted the novel into a two-hour TV film, Scoop . Directed by Gavin Millar, it starred Michael Maloney as William Boot and Denholm Elliott as Salter.
In 2009, the novel was serialised and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Waugh includes passing mentions of Lord Copper and the Daily Beast in his later novels, Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Officers and Gentlemen (1955). [14] [15]
"Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole", a line from one of Boot's countryside columns, has become a famous comic example of overblown prose style.[ citation needed ] It inspired the name of the environmentalist magazine Vole , which was originally titled The Questing Vole.
The fictional newspaper in Scoop served as the inspiration for the title of Tina Brown's online news source, The Daily Beast . [16]
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.
William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, generally known as Lord Beaverbrook, was a Canadian-British newspaper publisher and backstage politician who was an influential figure in British media and politics of the first half of the 20th century. His base of power was the largest circulation newspaper in the world, the Daily Express, which appealed to the conservative working class with intensely patriotic news and editorials. During the Second World War, he played a major role in mobilising industrial resources as Winston Churchill's Minister of Aircraft Production.
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of Charles Ryder, especially his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion, Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Lord Sebastian and Lady Julia. The novel explores themes including Catholicism and nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy. A well-received television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981. In 2008, it was adapted as a film.
William Francis Deedes, Baron Deedes, was a British Conservative politician, army officer and journalist. He was the first person in Britain to have been both a member of the Cabinet and the editor of a major daily newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.
William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp,, styled Viscount Elmley until 1891, was a British Liberal politician. He was Governor of New South Wales between 1899 and 1901, a member of the Liberal administrations of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H. H. Asquith between 1905 and 1915, and leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords between 1924 and 1931. When political enemies threatened to make his homosexuality public, he resigned from office to go into exile. Lord Beauchamp is often assumed to be the model for the character Lord Marchmain in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited.
Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard was an English poet and later a writer for the New Statesman.
Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, was a leading British newspaper proprietor who owned Associated Newspapers Ltd. He is best known, like his brother Alfred Harmsworth, later Viscount Northcliffe, for the development of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Rothermere was a pioneer of popular tabloid journalism, and an enthusiastic proponent of closer links between the UK and Nazi Germany of which he was a prominent British admirer.
Vole was a British environmentalist magazine published between 1977 and 1980. It was founded by journalist Richard Boston, with funding from Monty Python member Terry Jones. The magazine was intended to have a more light-hearted tone than the other countryside and ecology magazines of the time. The founders' working title for the magazine was The Questing Vole, a quotation from the fictitious nature column written by William Boot, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop (1938) – "Feather-footed through the plashy fens passes the questing vole".
Thomas Edward Neil Driberg, Baron Bradwell was a British journalist, politician, High Anglican churchman and possible Soviet spy, who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1942 to 1955, and again from 1959 to 1974. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain for more than twenty years, he was first elected to parliament as an Independent and joined the Labour Party in 1945. He never held any ministerial office, but rose to senior positions within the Labour Party and was a popular and influential figure in left-wing politics for many years.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a novel by the British writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in July 1957. It is Waugh's penultimate full-length work of fiction, which the author called his "mad book"—a largely autobiographical account of a period of hallucinations caused by bromide intoxication that he experienced in the early months of 1954, recounted through his protagonist Gilbert Pinfold.
Scoop is a 1987 television film directed by Gavin Millar, adapted by William Boyd from the 1938 satirical novel Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. It was produced by Sue Birtwistle with executive producers Nick Elliott and Patrick Garland. Original music was made by Stanley Myers. The story is about a reporter sent to the fictional African state of Ishmaelia by accident.
Aloysius is Lord Sebastian Flyte's teddy bear in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945.
Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, was a British newspaper and publishing magnate. As owner of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, he was an early developer of popular journalism, and he exercised vast influence over British popular opinion during the Edwardian era. Lord Beaverbrook said he was "the greatest figure who ever strode down Fleet Street." About the beginning of the 20th century there were increasing attempts to develop popular journalism intended for the working class and tending to emphasize sensational topics. Harmsworth was the main innovator. He said, "News is something someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising."
Brideshead Revisited is a 2008 British drama film directed by Julian Jarrold. The screenplay by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies is based on the 1945 novel of the same name by Evelyn Waugh, which previously had been adapted in 1981 as the television serial Brideshead Revisited.
William Boot is a fictional journalist who is the protagonist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel Scoop.
The Bright Young Things, or Bright Young People, was a term given by the tabloid press to a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in 1920s London. They threw flamboyant fancy dress parties, went on elaborate treasure hunts through nighttime London, and some drank heavily or used illicit drugs — all of which was enthusiastically covered by journalists such as Charles Graves and Tom Driberg.
Percy William David Izzard was the well-known gardening correspondent on the Daily Mail newspaper and author of several books on gardening.
Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell was a British historian and academic who served as dean and later principal of Hertford College, Oxford. His field of expertise was modern European history, his most notable work being A History of the Great War, 1914–18. He is mainly remembered, however, for the vendetta pursued against him by the novelist Evelyn Waugh, in which Waugh showed his distaste for his former tutor by repeatedly using the name "Cruttwell" in his early novels and stories to depict a sequence of unsavoury or ridiculous characters. The prolonged minor humiliation thus inflicted may have contributed to Cruttwell's eventual mental breakdown.
Sir William Beach Thomas, was a British author and journalist known for his work as a war correspondent and his writings about nature and country life.
Piers Court is a country house in Stinchcombe on the Cotswold Edge in Gloucestershire, England. A Grade II* listed building, in the mid-20th century the court was home to the novelist Evelyn Waugh.