Waugh in Abyssinia by Evelyn Waugh

I had never thought to ask "How much of Scoop is actually true?" I had assumed that a satirical novel set during an abortive African war would be almost entirely untethered from the actual facts of the Abyssinian/Italian war of 1936.

And then I read Waugh in Abyssinia [1], the book Evelyn Waugh wrote immediately before Scoop, a non-fictional account of his time as a newspaper reporter covering that war - well, mostly the early period, when it looked like there would be a war but it hadn't quite started yet, with a late coda covering a short second visit, more than six months later, to see the Italian occupation. And I was amazed to see how many of the bizarre, goofy details of Scoop were straight out of the actual war and Waugh's own experiences.

I don't know of any edition that brings the two books together, but that could be a fascinating thing, especially if there was a scholar who could draw out the comparisons and who knew the real (messy, complicated, not necessarily explicated perfectly by Waugh) history, too.

Abyssinia is an interesting, fascinating read in any case - Waugh is particularly good on the weird contingent atmosphere in a corrupt society on the brink of a war that hasn't quite started yet - but it's particularly strong for a reader who has recently read Scoop, which, by random coincidence, I had.

On the other hand, Waugh mostly suppressed this book - and his other three pre-war travel books - post-WWII, publishing a "good parts" version of all four under the title When the Going Was Good and declaring nothing else in those books was worth reading. In the case of Abyssinia, I suspect his glowing accounts of Italian road-building and civilization-bringing in the closing chapter - with some language that shades far too close to "these fascist chappies really know how to run a society, and we should follow their lead" in retrospect - was the big issue.

But Waugh was always moderately racist, and Abyssinia under Halie Selassie was, by all accounts, deeply corrupt, badly run, and full of factions who kept just this side of actual open battle. I'm finding Waugh's travel books' strengths are largely related to how weird and complex and irrational the places he visited were - and Abyssinia, just before the war, was about as weird and complex and irrational as any real-world place ever could be.

Waugh is not writing about the larger geopolitical context here, but it was certainly in the back of his mind, and the minds of his readers, in 1936. Europe was stumbling towards war - medium-sized ones, like the Spanish Civil War, and the Big One that came a few years later - and Abyssinia could be a microcosm of that. In that context, Waugh's hopeful note at the end - that this war was quick, and the conquerors seemed, in the early stages, to be competent and doing productive things - could be seen as optimism, or self-delusion, or a dozen other things on that spectrum, depending on the reader.

Abyssinia also has a lot of excellent Waugh sentences and thoughts; I dog-eared more passages here - and it's a short book - than I usually do. Waugh was grumpy, misanthropic, and, at this point in his life, more than slightly flirting with fascist sympathies - but he was also a fine thinker and observer, sometimes because of his prejudices and sometimes in spite of them.

[1] I read it in the big '90s omnibus Waugh Abroad, which collects all seven of his travel books.