Scoop (novel)

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Scoop
Jacket of the first UK edition
AuthorEvelyn Waugh
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel
PublisherChapman & Hall
Publication date
1938
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Preceded byA Handful of Dust 
Followed byPut Out More Flags 
TextScoop online

Scoop is a 1938 novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. It is a satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents.

Summary

William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty, far from the iniquities of London, contributes nature notes to Lord Copper's Daily Beast, a national daily newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a

foreign correspondent, when the editors mistake him for John Courteney Boot, a fashionable novelist and a remote cousin. He is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state
in East Africa, to report on the crisis there.

Lord Copper believes it "a very promising little war" and proposes "to give it fullest publicity". Despite his total ineptitude, Boot accidentally gets the journalistic "scoop" of the title. When he returns, the credit goes to the other Boot and William is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief.

Background

The novel is partly based on Waugh's experience of working for the Daily Mail, when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia, later known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (October 1935 to May 1936). When he got a scoop on the invasion, he telegraphed the story back in Latin for secrecy but they discarded it.[1] Waugh wrote up his travels more factually in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), which complements Scoop.

Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, has been said to be an amalgam of

folie de grandeur of Rothermere and Beaverbrook and included "the ghost of Rothermere's elder brother, Lord Northcliffe. Before he died tragically, deranged and attended by nurses, Northcliffe was already exhibiting some of Copper's eccentricities—his megalomania, his habit of giving ridiculous orders to underlings".[3]

It is widely believed that Waugh based his protagonist, William Boot, on Deedes, a junior reporter who arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22, with "a quarter of a ton of baggage".[4] In his memoir At War with Waugh, Deedes wrote that: "Waugh like most good novelists drew on more than one person for each of his characters. He drew on me for my excessive baggage—and perhaps for my naivety...." He further observed that Waugh was reluctant to acknowledge models, so that with Black Mischief's portrait of a young ruler, "Waugh insisted, as he usually did, that his portrait of Seth, Emperor of Azania, was not drawn from any real person such as Haile Selassie".[5] According to Peter Stothard, a more direct model for Boot may have been William Beach Thomas, "a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent".[6]

The novel is full of all but identical opposites: Lord Copper of The Beast, Lord Zinc of the Daily Brute (the Daily Mail and

Black Shirts (fascists) etc.[3]

Other models for characters (again, according to Deedes): "Jakes is drawn from

Mrs Stitch is partly based on Lady Diana Cooper, Mr Baldwin is a combination of Francis Rickett and Antonin Besse. Waugh's despised Oxford tutor C. R. M. F. Cruttwell makes his customary cameo appearance, as General Cruttwell.[9]

One of the points of the novel is that even if there is little news happening, the world's media descending requires that something happen to please their editors and owners back home and so they will create news.[10]

Reception

press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page."[11]

Scoop was included in

Adaptations

In 1972, Scoop was made into a BBC serial: it was adapted by Barry Took, and starred Harry Worth as William Boot and James Beck as Corker.

In 1987, William Boyd adapted the novel into a two-hour TV film, Scoop. Directed by Gavin Millar, it starred Michael Maloney as William Boot and Denholm Elliott as Salter.

In 2009 the novel was serialised and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Legacy

Waugh includes passing mentions of Lord Copper and the Daily Beast in his later novels, Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Officers and Gentlemen (1955).[14][15]

"Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole", a line from one of Boot's countryside columns, has become a famous comic example of overblown prose style.[citation needed] It inspired the name of the environmentalist magazine Vole, which was originally titled The Questing Vole.

The fictional newspaper in Scoop served as the inspiration for the title of Tina Brown's online news source, The Daily Beast.[16]

Notes and references

  1. .
  2. ^ Taylor, Alan John Percivale. Beaverbrook. Hamish Hamilton, London 1972, p. 678.
  3. ^ a b Deedes, p. 104.
  4. ^ Deedes, p. 102.
  5. ^ Deedes, pp. 44, 72.
  6. ^ "Hay, We got it Wrong". The Times. 29 May 2007. Archived from the original on 7 November 2017.
  7. ^ Deedes, p. 112.
  8. ^ Deedes, p. 113.
  9. ^ Deedes, W. F. (28 May 2003). "The real Scoop: Who was Who in Waugh's Cast List and Why". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 25 November 2014.
  10. ^ "Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop': Journalism Is A Duplicitous Business". Archived from the original on 17 June 2013.
  11. .
  12. ^ McCrum, Robert (12 October 2003). "The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list". The Observer.
  13. ^ "The 100 Best Novels, in English, of the 20th Century". The Modern Library Association.
  14. ^ Waugh, Evelyn (1962) [1945]. "Book 3, 'A Twitch upon the Thread', Chapter 2". Brideshead Revisited. Harmondsworth: Penguin. p. 253.
  15. ^ Waugh, Evelyn (1964) [1955]. "Book 2, 'In the Picture', Section 3". Officers and Gentlemen. Harmondsworth: Penguin. p. 154.
  16. ^ "Tina Brown Launches Much-Awaited News Site". HuffPost. 6 October 2008. Archived from the original on 8 October 2008.

Sources

External links