Easter Eggs 004: Waugh

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

The newspaper at the heart of Evelyn Waugh's classic satire on the journalist's trade, Scoop, is—rather famously—dubbed The Beast. Seeing this, after finally getting round to reading the book, it triggered a dim memory that this fictional newspaper had served as the inspiration for the name of Tina Brown's publication The Daily Beast. 

Makes sense. What's odd, however, is that the newspaper is never actually referred to as the "Daily" Beast in the novel's pages. Rather, it is the paper's rival and doppelgänger, the Brute, which is—at least in the above-cited passage, referenced by its full title as a daily. This was all to the best of my recollection, at any rate, after finishing the novel. 

I wanted to be doubly-sure, so I typed in the exact phrase "Daily Beast," into a Google books scan of the 2012 Back Bay Books/Little Brown and Co. edition of the novel. It appears only once, quite early in the novel, when the newspaper magnate Lord Copper boasts, "It has been my experience, dear Mrs. Stitch, that the Daily Beast can command the talent of the world."

Here is where the plot thickens. Because, I swear to you, I remembered that scene between Copper and Stitch well, yet I had no recollection of Lord Copper using the words the "Daily Beast." And, I felt, I would surely have remembered such a direct use a phrase that has now become embedded in our pop psyche, due to the omnipresence of Brown's publication. 

So I looked it up. I flipped back through the pages of my copy of the novel—the 1999 Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Co. edition. Sure enough, in this version, Lord Copper still delivers much the same speech. Except, here, he doesn't say the "Daily Beast." He says: "It has been my experience, dear Mrs. Stitch, that the Megalopolitan can command the talent of the world."

the irrefutable photographic evidence

Which makes more sense anyways, since—as I understand it, on my reading of the novel—the Beast is merely one imprint of the larger print media empire that Lord Copper oversees: the empire, that is, of Megalopolitan Newspapers. 

So what is happening here? Did Waugh leave behind a few textual variants? Or is something infinitely more sinister afoot? Perhaps our publishers, in order to sell more copies of the book and tie it into a phrase and entity that will be more familiar to contemporary readers, have tampered with the text. They have inserted the phrase "Daily Beast" where it never belonged. 

This theory is strengthened by the fact that our publishers refer to the paper again as the "Daily Beast" on the cover pitch on Google Books, perpetuating the deception. I think it's official: they inserted a phrase into the 2012 edition (after Tina Brown's publication was already out there attracting attention), which was never included in Waugh's original.

Which is of course a very Megalopolitan, Scoop-ian, Beastly thing to do. To bend the truth for the sake of bending the ear of the reader. It is how all the mendacious, swaggering journos behave in the course of Waugh's book. Perhaps that is the joke. I like it, if so.