Evelyn Waugh wouldn’t be caught dead at your dinner party.
Waugh, one of my favorite misanthropic bastards in literary history, put a lot of effort into putting as much distance between himself & the rest of humanity as possible. To that end, he went to the trouble of printing up these all-purpose “Mr. Evelyn Waugh is not interested in your petty invitations and cordially invites you to fuck off” cards, which he would hand out to people who made demands on him (e.g. aspiring writers seeking critiques of their manuscripts, friends requesting his presence at dinner parties, his children asking him to stop publicly referring to them as “physically inept, monotonous, defective adults who fill me with depression”)
I like this convenient, good-for-all-occasions way of rebuffing unwanted requests and am considering printing my own set of “Miss Fresherhells greatly regrets that she cannot do what you so kindly suggest” cards. Just reviewing this morning’s events, I can think of several people to whom I could’ve given a card. For example, my boss, who stated, “I expect you to take this seriously” regarding analyzing a script which features a wise-cracking cat who freebases cocaine & has AIDS as the male lead, to the gentleman who lives on the 42nd St. subway platform and likes to greet me with a joyous, “Hey, Bootylicious! Swing it! Swing what your momma gave you!”
