Wrong Boot

SCOOP--Evelyn Waugh--Little, Brown ($2.50).

Evelyn Waugh (pronounced Waw) is the Erskine Caldwell of the British upper classes. The feeble-minded baronets that he pictured in Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall peer out upon the great world in contented incomprehension. Although they are not as hungry as Caldwell's Tobacco Roaders, they have the same weary way of repeating themselves, the same facility in wrecking automobiles, the same batlike blinking bewilderment, when some thing new appears. When Decline and Fall, published in 1929, won extraordinary acclaim for its 25-year-old author, critics said that Waugh looked like England's strongest claim to a first-rate satirist. As it was followed with weaker tales, perfunctory travel books, a pious biography of Elizabethan Edmund Campion, and as Waugh became more interested in politics, his novels became more like those of an ax-grinding P. G. Wodehouse.

Scoop, his latest, is Caldwell in character, Wodehouse in plot. Mrs. Algernon Stitch, to help her novelist friend. John Boot, sang his praises, asked powerful, shirt-stuffed Publisher Lord Copper why he did not send Boot to cover the war in Ishmaelia. Lord Copper had never heard of Boot, did not want to admit it, told his foreign editor to get Boot at all costs. The editor made a natural mistake. He shipped William Boot, a quiet, untraveled, eccentric nature columnist on Lord Copper's newspaper, to Ishmaelia. There the wrong Boot found many correspondents but no war, no news, no use for folding boats, surgical instruments, Union Jack and joined flagpole with which he had been provided.

Scoop covers much of the ground covered in Waugh's account of his experiences as a war correspondent, Waugh in Abyssinia. But it has one major difference. In Waugh in Abyssinia he described how he lived for some time with a mysterious Mr. Rickett. Rickett, hinting that he had important news to disclose, was so vague that Waugh, not interested, missed the best news story of the war: when Rickett got Ethiopia's oil and mineral rights from Haile Selassie. In Scoop, poor blundering William Boot is far more fortunate. He falls in love with a German girl, stays in the capital when rival correspondents are sent out to a non-existent front, scoops the world when Communists pull a coup d'etat, are frustrated by a mysterious British financier. Although in parts as funny as anything that Waugh has written, it sounds just a shade too much like wish fulfillment to have the true cold blood of satire.

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