Here I place more excerpts from this interview, broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 16th November 1953. The interviewers (separately unidentified, unfortunately) were Charles Wilmot, Jack Davies and Stephen Black.

***************************************

Do you find that writing comes easily to you or is it a hard labour?

Gets harder as I get older. It’s disagreeable work.

It’s disagreeable work?

I find it so, yes.

In what way disagreeable - the actual physical writing?

Well, that doesn’t give you any release in a muscular way, that most forms of work do. And it’s a cramping sort of position to be in and so on. But of course the real disagreeable part is the thinking so hard.

Are you a fairly facile writer? I mean, do you work quickly and you don’t have to keep crossing out your ideas and rewriting them?

I write everything about twice, I suppose.

Do you write it twice on the same bit of paper?

No, I tear up the bad effort and start again. And there are a great many changes all the time. If I’m at work on a book, the words are running in my head all the time, and I’ll get up in the middle of a meal, to run off to change a word, and - like that.

And when you are writing a book, do you work a great many hours a day on it?

Well, really all the time. Not in the sense that I’m sitting at the desk all the time, but it’s in my mind whatever I’m doing.

How long do you sit at the desk?

I should think on an average about four hours.

How long does it take you to write a book?

Longer and longer as I get older. I used to be able to write a full length book in about two months, and now it takes me something like a year.

Apart from earning a living by writing, Mr Waugh, why do you write?

As distinct from earning a living in some other way, do you mean?

Yes, or even that way - I mean, do you wish to express some novel thoughts, or do you wish to convey a message or what do you -

No, I wish to make a pleasant object. I think any work of art is something exterior to oneself, it’s the making of something whether it’s a bed-table or a book.

And are you much affected while you’re working, by your environment?

Well, all I ask is quiet, and solitude, not being disturbed ...

And have you many leisure interests which you pursue steadily?

Well, ... you’ve caught me at a notoriously dangerous age, because at fifty one’s got bored with the pleasures of youth, and one hasn’t yet quite acquired the pleasures of age. So at the moment you find me rather bored.

What would you call the pleasures of youth?

The pleasures of youth are meeting new people, going to new places, having new experiences, being surprised and shocked and amused. And after fifty it’s harder to find these things.

I just wondered what your interests were, I mean the interests which you would pursue more whole-heartedly if you had more time.

If I had more time and more money, I’d certainly collect a great deal more. I’m a very keen collector and have been from earliest infancy.

A collector of what?

Primarily paintings, but also furniture and any works of art.

Contemporary paintings?

Oh no, no. Oh no, no, no. I mean real paintings.

What period?

Anything up to about 1870.

What painters do you admire most?

Augustus Egg I’d put among the highest.

You think real painting stopped about 1850?

In England, certainly ...

Well now, can you give us any reasons in your mind, of this decay, general decay in the arts? As a whole.

Pure sloth chiefly, sloth ...

Do you find it easy to get on with the man in the street?

I’ve never met such a person.

Do you like people generally when you meet them in trains or buses? Or on a ship?

I never travel in a bus, and I never address a stranger in a train.

Well, you meet people on board ship, for example, when travelling.

I’ve never introduced myself or been introduced to anybody on board a ship. If I find friends on board, then I’m delighted.

But you can’t go about in a sort of Trappist condition - you must meet people. Do you enjoy meeting people?

By the time one’s fifty, one has met a great number of people and it’s always agreeable if one has a sense of curiosity to meet them again if they turn up on board ship, for example, as you suggest. It’s very amusing suddenly to find someone you haven’t seen for twenty years, and to inquire what’s happened to him in the meantime. The prospect of just being introduced to somebody as just a person, a man, as you might say, in the street, is entirely repugnant ...

Could I ask you what failings in individuals, in others, you could most readily excuse?

Drunkenness.

Any others? Or are you so severe?

Anger. Lust. Dishonouring their father and mother. Coveting their neighbour’s ox, ass, wife. Killing. I think there is almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshipping graven images. That seems to me idiotic.

That you put as the - oh, what do you think are the most serious crimes in the calendar?

Well, that’s really not for me to decide ...

But in personal, you’ve never yourself felt that there is an evil incarnate in an individual which should be removed and, if you could, you would remove it?

And now you’re speaking of exorcism; the -

Well, execution more - (second man) He means, have you ever wanted to kill somebody -

You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

So, for instance, you would not be in favour of capital punishment?

Indeed I would, I think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.

You are in favour of capital punishment?

For an enormous number of offences. Yes.

And you yourself would be prepared to carry it out?

Do you mean actually do the hanging as well?

Yes.

I should think it very odd for them to choose a novelist for such tasks.

Supposing they were prepared to train you for the job, would you take it on?

Well, certainly.

You would?

Certainly.

Would you like such a job, Mr Waugh?

Not the least ...

Have you - you have, of course, Mr Waugh, travelled a great deal.

A fair amount.

A fair amount, yes. You - how do you find people of various countries, various nationalities, various parts of the world - are they all much about the same as you were now saying, or are they all individuals? What I mean is, have they desires, aspirations in common, or are they -

I clearly can’t make myself understood. I was saying that people weren’t ever anywhere alike at all. There is no such thing as a man in the street, there is no ordinary run of mankind; there are only individuals who are totally different, and whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in the Sudan, or is clothed in some kind of costume in the bus in England, they are still individuals and entirely different characters.

Then you think that travel is not useful to a novelist, for example? You might as well stay at home in Gloucestershire.

Well, a novelist again; you see you’re always trying to use these meaningless phrases -there’s no such thing as a novelist: there are a great variety of novelists. Certain novelists can indeed stay at home, like Jane Austen, and produce admirable novels out of just what they see within five miles of their own rectory. Other people, like Conrad, have to go to the Seven Seas in order to find stories.

I think you said earlier that you weren’t interested in people in groups but when you travel you meet people in groups. You rarely have time when travelling really to meet individuals. Or do you find that you do?

Well, of course, the truth is that one doesn’t look on them as individuals when you’re travelling. You know they are individuals, but if you’re just in a town, say, in Morocco watching a religious festival, you’re simply enjoying a spectacle as someone might like going to the theatre.

You’re enjoying a spectacle, apart from the festival itself, of crowds, and yet crowds you don’t like.

Well, I shouldn’t really wish to be mixed up in the crowd of people slashing themselves with daggers and going into ecstatic frenzies, you know. I’d sooner be in an upper window looking down on them.

You like, in fact, generally speaking to be in an upper window looking down?

If it’s a matter of crowds, I like the spectacle of a strange crowd, not the contact of a familiar one ...

Can you tell me this? Are you yourself as an individual conscious of any particular failing of yourself?

I mean, are you asking me to confess to some moral lapse, or to inadequacy in talent?

Well. I should like to ask you to confess to some particular moral lapse, but what I really mean is what - in what respect do you as a human being feel that you have primarily failed?

I have never learned French well, and I never learned any other language at all; I’ve forgotten most of my classics; I can’t often remember people’s faces in the streets; and I don’t like music. Those are very grave failings.

But no others - you are not conscious of?

Those are the ones that worry me most.

Well now, finally, how, when you die, would you like to be remembered?

I should like people of their charity to pray for my soul as a sinner.