by A quiet afternoon in the shop with Evelyn Waugh’s comedy of Fleet Street, and an awkward look at my own trade
The Wrong Man Is Sent to the War: Rereading the Best Novel Ever Written About Newspapers
Rain all day. Four customers, one of whom wanted the toilet. So I did what a bookseller does on such afternoons: took something down from the shelf behind the till, put my feet on a box of unpriced Penguins and read it straight through. It was Evelyn Waugh’s novel of 1938 about the press. I have read it five times. I laughed so much at one point that Pevsner the cat got off my lap in disgust. And when I had finished I felt slightly ashamed, because I work for a newspaper, of a sort, and the book has us bang to rights.
The Story
For those who have not had the pleasure. A press baron, owner of a mighty popular daily, is told at a luncheon party that a fashionable young novelist ought to be sent to cover a brewing civil war in a far-off African republic. The proprietor gives the order. It passes down through the frightened ranks of his staff. And by a mix-up over a surname, the summons goes instead to a distant cousin of the novelist: a shy, penniless young man who lives in a crumbling house in the West Country with a crowd of ancient relatives, and who writes the paper’s fortnightly nature column, about voles and badgers.
He has never been abroad. He does not want to go. He is too timid to say so. He is kitted out at vast expense with cleft sticks for sending messages, a collapsible canoe and a great many other things he cannot identify, and dispatched.
In the republic he finds the hotel full of the foreign correspondents of the world, all of whom know there is no story and are busy cabling one home anyway. They sit in the bar. They follow each other in a pack. They chase a rumour to a town that turns out not to exist; it is a clerk’s note on the map meaning I do not know. And our nature columnist, who stays behind because he does not grasp what he is meant to be doing, stumbles by pure innocence on the one real story, the coup that actually happens, and sends it home in plain sentences that cost his paper a fortune by the word. He returns a hero. He wants only to go back to his voles.
Why It Is So Good
The author knew what he was talking about. In 1935 he had been sent to Abyssinia by a London daily to report the Italian invasion. He was, by his own cheerful admission, hopeless at it. He missed the biggest story of the campaign and, when he did get hold of something, cabled it in Latin to keep it from his rivals, and nobody in the office could read it. He came home, wrote a non-fiction book about the war, and then turned the whole experience into a farce.
So every detail is observed. The telegrams, in that clipped language reporters used to save money, with words run together. The foreign editor who has no idea where anything is. The legendary American correspondent, spoken of in whispers, who once overslept on a train, got off in the wrong Balkan capital, filed a thousand words on a revolution that was not occurring, and so alarmed the markets that within the week there was one. The proprietor, a vain, vague tyrant whose underlings are too scared to contradict him and have developed a formula for it: when he is right they say definitely, and when he is wrong they murmur a soft little phrase that means no and sounds like yes.
That phrase has passed into the language. Anyone who has ever worked for a boss has needed it.
Fleet Street always had its private languages, as closed to an outsider as the Cockney rhyming slang of the streets around it.
What It Says About News
It is tremendously funny. It is also, underneath, quite a savage book. Its argument is that news is not what happens. News is what a newspaper can sell by Thursday. The correspondents are not liars exactly. They are tradesmen with a product to deliver, and if the war does not supply it they will make do. The readers at home want a battle, and the proprietor wants what the readers want, and the truth, such as it is, belongs to a nature columnist who does not know the rules.
There is a scene I think about a good deal. An old hand explains the trade to the beginner on the boat out. He says, in effect, that if a story has been in the paper, it has happened. You file it, the rival papers send their men to match it, the government issues a denial, and the denial is another story. By the end of the week the thing is real because so many people have described it.
That was written in 1938. I do not think I need to labour the point about where we are now.
The Uncomfortable Bits
I ought to be honest about the book’s faults, as I would to a customer. It was written by an Englishman of his class in the thirties, and its picture of an African country and its people is a cartoon, with attitudes that are ugly to read today. The author’s views in general ran well to the right of anything I could defend, and he could be a cruel man. The comedy is aimed at Fleet Street, and that part is immortal. Some of what it tramples on the way is not to its credit.
I sell it with that said. I have found people would sooner be told.
Where This Leaves Me
Two days a week I write for The London Prat. We print things that did not happen, in the voice of things that did. On a bad day I can see the old hand on the boat nodding at me. Is that not what we do? Make it up and send it out?
I put this to my editor, who has been at it a great deal longer than I have. She did not take it kindly. She said the difference is the whole point of our existence, and she marched me to the screen and made me reread the house statement, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not.
The correspondents in the novel pass off invention as fact, for money, and the reader is deceived. We do the opposite. Our masthead tells you what we are. The reader is in on it from the first line, and the purpose of the exaggeration is to send you back to the real news looking harder. A false report wants to be believed. A piece of ours wants to be seen through.
She said the danger comes only when one of our pieces gets loose from its label, is copied somewhere without the masthead and meets a person who takes it straight. That is why the paper keeps a plain guide for readers, how to tell satire from real news, with a checklist. Who published this? Is it reported anywhere else? Is it suspiciously neat? I notice that every one of those questions would have sunk the American and his revolution.
The handbook on how to run a satirical website makes the same demand from the other side: label everything, and never write what could be mistaken for a report of a real death or disaster. Waugh’s proprietor would have found that very poor business.
The Piece
I have written, naturally, a homage. A newspaper, it reports, has apologised after sending its gardening correspondent to cover an international crisis owing to a clerical error, and has apologised again on finding that his was the only accurate account. Rival correspondents, filing from the hotel bar, described the situation as tense. The gardening correspondent described it as mostly drizzle, with some good early crocuses.
It will go on the English satirical news page with the masthead firmly on.
The rain has not let up. I have put the novel back, spine out, at eye level, where the next person who needs it will find it. If you buy one book about my trade, buy that. Then read the paper, any paper, and see whether you can find the vole. More of what I write is here.
