Travel Blog

Evelyn Waugh was born on this day in 1903 in London, England.

I discovered him in college, in a course on The Modern British Novel. We read Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust. It took me a while to appreciate the humor, but I was immediately taken by his world and the language he used to create it: spare but at the same time elegant.

Of course, my professor never mentioned his travel writing. I came across it on my own, picking up a copy of When the Going Was Good in a Left Bank bookstore at the start of a post-graduate wanderjahr. It seemed a validation of my desire to become a travel writer.

Later I discovered more serious travel writers - Robert Byron, Norman Douglas, Freya Stark - but none of their books replaced Waugh's in my affections. Part of it was probably the circumstances in which I read it, but much of it was simply my admiration for the writing. There is a passage from "A Pleasure Cruise in 1929" - a description of the deserted Spanish-American Exposition in Seville - that I read to every travel writing class I teach as an example of how clear-eyed observation - piling one telling detail upon another - allows you to show instead of tell.

There are lines of Waugh's that occur to me on a regular basis. "I am almost deaf now," he wrote in his later years to Nancy Mitford. "Such a relief." Naturally, I am very fond of his "I prefer all but the very worst travel books to all but the very best novels." And every time I fly somewhere I am reminded of one of his fictional heroes sitting at an airport: "Scott-King was hungry, weary and dispirited for he was new to the amenities of modern travel."