Hop over to New Partisan if you have a minute. The piece is by Lincoln MacVeagh and it’s well done and fascinating.

I’d love to have more Waugh on my “next up” book shelf. I have managed Brideshead Revisited, which I admired very much, and a volume of collected letters that’s around here somewhere.

Here’s what MacVeagh writes about Brideshead:

Brideshead Revisited was produced in a mad dash while on special leave from the army in 1944. He wrote the first 62,000 words in less than three weeks and had consciously to force himself not to work faster: “It is always my temptation in writing to make everything happen in one day, in one hour on one page and so lose its drama and suspense. So all today I have been rewriting and stretching until I am cramped.”

The entire novel was finished in just four months and it was published a year later, shortly before Waugh was demobilized, in 1945.

Ahhhhhhh.