Introduction by David Cliffe

The four programmes from which I extract excerpts are, in order of date :

• a talk about the cemetery of Forest Lawn in California, given on the BBC radio Third Programme in 1948
• an interview by three interviewers in the BBC radio Home Service series Frankly Speaking, recorded in 1953
• an interview by John Freeman in the BBC television series Face to Face in 1960
• an interview by Elizabeth Jane Howard in the BBC television series Monitor in 1964

The first three are famous, indeed notorious; the last one is surprisingly little-known. Waugh obviously found Miss Howard, soon to be the wife of the novelist Kingsley Amis, a congenial interlocutrice, and speaks to her openly and without wariness, though he does not resist opportunities to guy the modern movement in his assessment of the work of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. We learn far more about the craft of novel-writing and Waugh’s view of his fellow writers in this interview than we do in the other three.

The talk on the subject of Forest Lawn just about avoids obvious irony; indeed one or two people were impressed at the time by its sincere and honest estimation of the cemetery! The publication of Waugh’s novel The Loved One in November 1948 indicated to them his true attitude.

The interview in Frankly Speaking nettled Waugh for years afterwards, indeed for the rest of his life. (He died in 1966.) The interviewers seemed to feel that their brief required them to probe and antagonize a man they clearly thought a third-rate survival from a less enlightened age. One of them can hardly keep the sneer out of his voice. They were soon disabused of their misconception of him as a man of negligible intellect. Waugh’s belief that the BBC was a body with immense and unjustified influence in the life of the country had no doubt led its self-important functionaries to indulge a general dismissal of his talents and opinions; and his views as expressed in this interview must have horrified the interviewers and confirmed the authorities in their estimation of him. He himself thought that he had been shamefully treated.

He was therefore well prepared and very much on his guard when (according to his own testimony) for financial reasons he decided to accept the invitation to appear in Face to Face. This was a series in which an expert interviewer, almost always John Freeman, tried to elicit material of a confessional nature from famous people. Freeman achieved fame for reducing to tears a notably crusty media celebrity, Gilbert Harding, by impertinently questioning him on the death of his mother. Waugh refused to adopt a defensive posture, though Freeman thought it his duty to press him hard with testing questions. Waugh ran rings round his interviewer for most of the time, to the extent that Freeman was occasionally nonplussed by the cogency, precision and brevity of his answers. There was only one point where Waugh might be thought to be seeking to avoid an answer (when he was asked what he did at Oxford), but many observers thought that this effect was engineered by the experienced Freeman : he speeded up the questioning in order (unsuccessfully) to produce a flustered interviewee.

Lady Mosley (née Diana Mitford, who died in August 2003 at the age of 93) put her finger on one reason for Waugh’s greatness when she pointed out that the success of the dialogue in Waugh’s novels was the consequence of the accuracy and brevity which he employed in his own conversation. It was, she pointed out, leavened by wit; one word in a sentence was often an amusing and unexpected but illuminating choice. In the interviews, you will probably find admirable his concision in expressing his views, disconcerting for his interviewers as it sometimes appears to be. At the time of the discussion with Miss Howard, however, Waugh was already well into his decline towards death, so that some of his briskness and cogency was lacking. Nevertheless this frailty had the advantage of encouraging him to expand on his opinions, so that the whole interview gives the impression of being a chat with a friend.

I have included a few notes where I feel they are needed.

Note that I have added complete transcripts of the Face to Face and Monitor interviews.