When someone called his attention to a typographical error in one of his books, he replied that one cannot get any decent proofreading now “that they no longer defrock priests for sodomy.”*******
While serving in the British army in Yugoslavia during World War II, he spread the rumor that Marshal Tito was a woman–and a lesbian into the bargain.
Of the reception in America of his novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), he wrote: “My book has been a great success in the United States which is upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can't be.”
In Yugoslavia, for a notable example, Waugh put it about that Birkenhead was having a homosexual affair with an Istrian intellectual and had also become a drug addict through the use of morphia. And, one must understand, he rather liked Birkenhead. Such free-floating malice evidently helped him get through the day.
After witnessing his rudeness to a French intellectual to whom she introduced him, Nancy Mitford asked him if it weren't a contradiction that he was so rude a man and yet he claimed to be a practicing Catholic. “You have no idea,” he replied, “how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” He might have added, as he wrote in his essay on his conversion, that “[t]he Protestant attitude seems often to be, 'I am good; therefore I go to church'; while the Catholic's is, 'I am very far from good; therefore I go to church.'"
Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits
