Critic of the Booboisie

In my spare time, I collect significant encounters that never took place. Karl Marx and Charles Darwin were intended by a mutual friend to meet but the rendezvous did not occur. George Orwell waited for Albert Camus to keep an appointment in a café in St. Germain but gave up and slouched away. Almost as soon as he was exiled to Switzerland, Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a date to have lunch with Vladimir Nabokov, but apparently lost his nerve and failed the feast. On the day of the terrible stroke that pulled down his mental shutters for good, H.L. Mencken was due to break bread with Evelyn Waugh.

It would have been good to have (even from Alistair Cooke, who had proposed the introduction) an account of this aborted conversation between two Tories, two snobs, two racists, two masters of prose and humor and invective, two literary products of the vulgar industry of journalism. One was a self-caricaturing English type with a disdain for America and the other a snarling Anglophob...