This section gathers the excerpts from this interview which I have been able to find. Waugh stipulated that it should only be broadcast on the BBC World Service to non-European and non-American regions of the world. It does not seem to be particularly offensive to us today, but we cannot now hear the interviewer Stephen Black’s voice, which was apparently superior and uningratiating. (I do not know if recordings of the interview exist.) Waugh certainly thought that this interview was both insulting and humiliating. One question which is not in my excerpts (and to which I do not know Waugh’s answer) apparently was Does your wife fit in with your demand for interesting or beautiful people that you want to have around you? The impertinent nature of the question is obvious even today.

The interview was first broadcast on 29th September 1953. Stephen Black opens the interview.

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 I’m wondering if you can tell us why you - where you derive this sense of satire, this bitterness about the current events - the world in which we live today.

Well, you’ve said two rather different things there. Bitterness about the world we live in is surely common to the whole of mankind. No one doubts that the whole of civilization is very rapidly moving into chaos. Whether one’s bitter about that or resigned is just according to whether one’s good tempered or bad tempered.

And there are people who believe that civilization is going on and on and up and up as was once said.

I think they must be locked up in lunatic asylums by now.

And you’re convinced that it is going down?

Well of course.

And have you any great mission in telling the world that through your books, or is it just that when you write you express what you feel yourself?

That is the material provided for me to do my work with. If I am given a mahogany plank that’s what I have to work with. And a decadent world is the material I’m given.

So that you see all aspects of the modern world as decadent?

Some are more decadent than others. Certain things like the Roman Catholic Church can never be decadent by their nature. Though they can decrease in numbers or give a superficial appearance in certain places as decadence.

You are a Roman Catholic, Mr Waugh?

I am, yes.

Have you always been a Roman Catholic?

No, for the last 25 or 30 years.

You became converted to the Roman Catholic faith?

Yes.

Would you like to tell me something about the reasons for your conversion?

Well you know, I don’t think I would. Because they aren’t interesting. There’s no human story in it. It was simply a fact of recognizing a plausible rational system, of following the arguments with proof of the historic truth of Christianity ...

Mr Waugh, can we ... have your views on some of the modern movements that are greatly influencing man’s thoughts today - we’ll leave Communism, on which we’re probably all agreed, but I would like to ask you what are your views on the ideas of the psychologist Freud?

I’m afraid I’ve never read him. Not a word he’s written.

So in fact you would say that you really know nothing about the work of Freud.

Nothing whatever.

And that, I may say, leaves me rather in the air as to how you arrive at this extremely satirical approach to the world, in which these ideas of Freud are continually playing a part in men’s lives and men’s attitudes today, and -

Not in the characters I write about. They’ve never heard of Freud, my people. Except the purely comic clowns ...

What did you read at Oxford?

The subject I was supposed to read was history.

Didn’t you really read history?

Not with any marked success; I took a bad third.

And when you came down from Oxford, what did you do then?

Oh then I went straight to an art school, where I was rather idle, and anyway realized I didn’t draw well enough, and hadn’t enough application ever to become a serious painter.

You were living at home then, and going to the art school in London?

That’s right.

And what were your activities if you were not busy with your art during that time?

Drinking mostly.

And were you interested in women at all at that time?

Not particularly - drink I preferred.

And you were writing, of course?

No, not a word.

How old were you when you started to earn your own living then?

I’ll have to think about that - 25.

And your first real success came when?

My second novel was the first popular success - a book called Vile Bodies ...

Where were you when the book was published?

I’m awfully sorry, I don’t know.

In France? Or Italy?

I think France. I’m pretty sure Paris, but I couldn’t go closer than that.

And you’ve no clear picture in your mind of this moment of success, because that was your real moment of success.

I’ve never been particularly ambitious about that sort of thing.

You didn’t really care then whether you had a success or not?

Well, it’s clearly more convenient to have money than not to have money ...

Tell me, Mr Waugh, where did you go after you came back from abroad and you’d had this success with Vile Bodies at the age of - how old were you?

25 - 26 - 28, I must have been, I think.

You were 28, and you were abroad and you’d had a great success as a writer. What did you do next?

Then I went abroad again.

And where did you live? Did you settle down anywhere?

No. I went to Abyssinia for the first time, for the Coronation - that must have been 1930 when I was 27 ...

You say for the first time. Did you go to Abyssinia again then?

Oh yes, twice afterwards.

When was the second time?

The second time was when the war was brewing. And then I went as a fully-fledged correspondent, and I was a great failure at it.

The war? You mean the Abyssinian war between Abyssinia and Italy?

Yes ...

And when the Second World War started what were you doing, were you living here at the time?

I was writing a book.

Which book, Mr Waugh?

Well it was never finished - because of the war. It would have been rather good, I think. It’s been published as a short story called Work Suspended. The first two chapters of it, that is ...

Tell me, Mr Waugh, when the war ended and you came out of the Army had you only one idea - to come back to this very lovely house and settle down again as a writer, or had it in any way disturbed your vision of the world as you wanted it for yourself?

Oh not in the least. I just wanted to come back here.