Scott-King's Modern Europe
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First book edition
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Author | Evelyn Waugh |
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Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Publisher |
Cornhill Magazine
Chapman & Hall (book) |
Publication date
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1947 |
Preceded by | Brideshead Revisited (1945) |
Followed by | The Loved One (1948) |
Scott-King's Modern Europe , published in 1947 , is a novella by Evelyn Waugh , sometimes called A Sojourn in Neutralia . It was first published in an abridged form in the Cornhill Magazine in 1947, [1] and then by Chapman & Hall , also in 1947. The first American edition, by Little, Brown , appeared in 1949.
Plot
Set shortly after the end of the Second World War , the story's central character is Scott-King, a middle-aged schoolmaster who for twenty-one years has taught classical languages at Granchester, an English private school which was his own old school. [2] Cautious and monosyllabic, he is described by Waugh as "a praiser of the past and a lover of exact scholarship", and is characterized as representing the old-fashioned virtues of honesty, decency, sanity, and, ultimately, heroism. [3] [4]
During his summer vacation, Scott-King visits Neutralia, a totalitarian republic ruled by a military dictator who was able to keep his country from becoming embroiled in the recent World War. The occasion for Scott-King's visit to Simona, the capital city, is that by publishing an English language translation of a long Latin poem by Bellorius, a minor 17th-century Neutralian poet, followed by a monograph on Bellorius himself, he has come to be seen as a leading authority on the work. [5] He has therefore been invited by the government of Neutralia to take part in a scholarly conference marking the poet's tercentenary . Unhappily, Scott-King does not think to inform the British government of his visit. [3] [4] [6]
At the same time as the Bellorius Tercentenary, Neutralia is hosting several other events, including a large philatelic conference and an international gathering of women athletes, and in Simona Scott-King meets a variety of remarkable characters. One of these, a scholar from Switzerland , is murdered, and Scott-King is tricked into laying a wreath for a questionable hero and unveiling a statue which is not what it seems, causing him to flee Simona disguised as a nun. On arrival at a Mediterranean seaport, he finds himself surrounded by anarchists , monarchists , Trotskyites , prostitutes, ballet dancers, former Gestapo officers, and Vichy collaborators . After a long sea journey, he arrives without his passport at a camp for Jewish illegal immigrants in the British Mandate for Palestine , where he is treated with suspicion until he is recognized by an old boy of his school and is thus able to establish his true identity. [3] [5]
Message
It seems at first ironic that the life work of Bellorius was in describing a fictional utopian island in the New World . However, the moral of Scott-King's Modern Europe is that attempts to create a rational Utopia should be expected to result in a repressive dystopia . [5] The conclusion of the story is the decision by Scott-King that "It would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world." [2]
A satire on post-1945 totalitarianism , the story sets out in particular Waugh's attitudes towards communism in the Balkans and is plainly also an attack on the drabness of the continent following the Second World War. [5] [7]
Background
Waugh gathered most of his material for the story from a trip he made to Franco's Spain in the summer of 1946 with Douglas Woodruff , editor of The Tablet , to attend events marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Francisco de Vitoria , claimed by some as the father of international law . [5] [8] He changed many details, including the country's name, as Spain's reactionary government was one he favoured more than he did most governments. [2]
References
- ↑ The Cornhill Magazine , vol. 162 (1947).
- 1 2 3 David Wykes, Evelyn Waugh: a literary life , p. 151.
- 1 2 3 Books: Journey to Neutralia dated February 21, 1949, at time.com, accessed 11 June 2011.
- 1 2 Jonathan Rose, The Revised Orwell (1992), p. 110.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Jeffrey M. Heath, The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and his writing (1982), pp. 184–186 .
- ↑ Philip Malcolm Waller Thody , The Conservative Imagination (1993), p. 146.
- ↑ Andrew Hammond, The Balkans and the West: constructing the European other, 1945–2003 (2004), p. 48.
- ↑ Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh, Volume II: No Abiding City 1939–1966 (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 168.
External links
- Scott-King's Modern Europe at Faded Page (Canada)