parody enfeebled by reality

By ( articles ) | Apr 13, 2005

In a letter to former schoolmate Tom Driberg, acknowledging praise for his recently published life of Ronald Knox and lamenting the typographical errors therein, Evelyn Waugh wrote, "I am told that printers' readers no longer exist because clergymen are no longer unfrocked for sodomy."

In 1960, that was pardonable hyperbole. Today, it looks as if proofreading on the Northeast seaboard is about to take a sudden turn for the better. I doubt if even Waugh could have foreseen the theological development that explains it. How we've grown.