"Oh dear, it’s very difficult being a Catholic,” complained Sebastian Flyte, the son of..."

[Brideshead]

““Oh dear, it’s very difficult being a Catholic,” complained Sebastian Flyte, the son of an old aristocratic English family that had remained Catholic since the days before Henry VIII. Sebastian was address¬ing Charles Ryder, a fellow Oxford student and friend, whom he had invited to vacation at his family’s estate called Brideshead.

Ryder was a polite agnostic who looked upon religion as pious nonsense—a hobby which immature people professed but enlightened people did not. And he wasn’t really surprised by Sebastian’s remark over the difficulty of being Catholic, because Sebastian was hardly a practicing Catholic. For one thing, he drank too much. So Charles replied, “1 suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?”

“Is it nonsense?” mused Sebastian. “I wish it were. It some¬times sounds terribly sensible to mc.”

“But my dear Sebastian,” pressed Charles, “you can’t really believe it all. I mean about … the star and three kings. And in prayers? You think you can kneel down in front of a statue . .. and change the weather?”

“Oh yes” said Sebastian. “Don’t you remember last term when I took Aloysius (his Teddy Bear!] and left him behind I didn’t know where? I prayed like mad to Saint Anthony … and immediately after lunch there was Mr. Nichols at Canterbury gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I’d left him in his cab.”

I think what Eveyln Waugh is trying to show in his novel Brideshead Revisited is how odd or schizoid we Catholics may appear in this day and age to people of more recent vintage. We are as modern as the next person. We accept the findings of science as far as they go. We are in fact physicists, doctors, astronauts, engineers.

We admit that comets have tails millions of miles long. And yet we persist in believing that a personal Creator (someone not unlike us) explains this great universe and not just a Big Bang. We believe this Creator remains in touch with us and is behind every human Exodus from bondage to real freedom, and that this Creator became present among us in Jesus whom we ineffectually killed because he would have us love rather than despise one another.

And so we can understand why Sebastian says he finds it difficult to be Catholic—to be caught up in two different worlds: one that prefers a skeptical approach to life and one inclined to give things seemingly fabulous the benefit of the doubt. At one point Ryder admits that Catholics at times do seem the same as other modern folk. But Sebastian plaintively protests, “My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not … they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time.”

The Charles Ryders of this world will continue to say, “How can you believe all that; there’s no scientific evidence of God; no one has ever seen God.” But since when has the human eyeball become the final arbiter of what exists or doesn’t exist? And insofar as the God of our Gospels has been ultimately identified with Love, doesn’t God become sublimely visible every time a human being behaves with compassion? Such sightings of God have been hap¬pening since the dawn of history and will continue to occur when¬ever love compels a human ego to explode with beneficence.”

- Living the Lectionary: Links to Life and Literature
by Gepff Wood

@темы: motifs, religion

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Sebastian’s famous teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited, sitting pretty at Castle Howard near...

[Brideshead]

Sebastian’s famous teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited, sitting pretty at Castle Howard near York, where the recent film was made.

@темы: aloysius, unhealthy pictures

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Aloysius is being sold on eBay: Up for auction is the House of...

[Brideshead]

Aloysius is being sold on eBay:

Up for auction is the House of Nisbet Aloysius Mascot size teddy bear. He is a quality reproduction of the original used in the PBS series “Brideshead Revisited”. He is 14 inches tall. He still has his Daks scarf with two pins and his arm hang tag but, unfortunately, the tag with his number was cut off, loosing his original number to time. He has no paperwork but his hang tag. This is a fine collectors bear. He is in excellent condition with no flaws that I can see. He is jointed at neck, arms, and legs and his suede patches are still in place. He comes from an estate sale, so I can not attest to his being smoke or pet-free. He is a beauty of a bear who needs a good home. If you have additional questions, please email me. Also up for auction is the larger Full size Aloysius, who is approximately 26 inches in height. As stated previously they do not have COA’s or the flight bags that were original to the bears. I am starting them out at a reasonable price for the above mentioned reason. A great deal for a wonderful, hard to find teddy in such fine condition.
If you dont like or cant afford the asking price, dont be affraid, make your best bid… all bids are being considered!

The buy-it-now price is $140.

@темы: aloysius

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kaiserbund: Look what showed up in the mail today! I am still...

[Brideshead]

kaiserbund:

Look what showed up in the mail today!

I am still checking my mailbox nervously every day. Mail works slowly where I live.

@темы: books, I like getting drunk at luncheons

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Midnight Brunch, by Marta Acosta

[Brideshead]

Midnight Brunch, by Marta Acosta:

Hip, funny Milagro de los Santos thinks she’s finally found love and a home at the California ranch of fabulous Oswald Grant and his urbane relatives, who have a rare genetic disorder that some call vampirism. But Milagro is bewildered when she’s excluded from an ancient and mysterious midnight ceremony whose participants include Oswald’s unfriendly parents, a creepy family elder, and Milagro’s ex-lover, the powerful and decadent Ian Ducharme. What skeletons are the vampires keeping in their designer closets?

When Milagro’s life is threatened by a rogue family member, she flees to the desert to hide. Instead of solitude, she encounters an egomaniacal actor, a partying heiress, a sly tabloid reporter, and a lavish spa full of dark secrets — all of which might help her find a way home.

The book has one mention of Brideshead Revisited and specifically Sebastian in it.

My favorite taqueria was about six blocks away, in a mish­mash of cafes, restaurants, bars, and small shops. Because my paperback hadn’t dried, I needed a book. I thought about get­ting another Bronte novel but discovered a used hardback of Waughs BridesbeadRevisited.

I took my tacos and horchata back to Mercedes’s and read while I ate. This solitary activity usually brought me joy, but my mind kept drifting from the character Sebastian Flyte to the Se­bastian I knew, SLIME. Sometimes life intrudes on fiction that way. Sebastian had been so beautiful and clever that I never sensed the corruption at his core. I’d thought that love would overcome the differences of class and culture.

Reading about Sebastian Flyres descent into depravity made me mourn SLIME’s descent into amorality.

Disturbing thoughts were scurrying like beetles around my brain, bringing in crumbs of information. I brushed rhem away, resisting the idea that I might be similarly deluded with Oswald.

It was late when I spackled on nighrtime makeup and sprayed and gooped my hair until it had doubled in volume.

@темы: books, i like getting drunk at luncheons

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Mermaid and the Sailor, by Allison Iory Allison

[Brideshead]

Mermaid and the Sailor, by Allison Iory Allison:

At the very tip of Cape Cod, twenty miles out to sea, a gigantic full moon was rising pumpkin orange and peeking over the rolling sand dunes encircling Provincetown Harbor. The enormous swollen moon dwarfed the village where twinkling lights reflected in dark water, and crickets hiding in the eel grass droned pulsating love songs. This was the Blue Moon, twice full in one month and two men stood on the deck of their summer cottage enjoying the twilight. Val leaned in close to Gyles neck playfully nibbling at his lover s ear and whispering, The Blue Moon is red-orange; everyone s in drag in Ptown. Or at least wearing a mask, this is Carnival week. replied Gyles encircling Val s taut waist in both his arms. The Mermaid and the Sailor is a romantic romp set in Provincetown and the third book of the Glamour Galore trilogy. This brings to a conclusion the saga begun with the Boston mystery, The Family Jewels followed by that legendary farce, Naughty Astronautess in which our heroine, Diva La Strange became the first drag queen astronaut.

One of the characters in the book has a teddy-bear named Sebastian Flyte.

@темы: books, sebastian, aloysius, I like getting drunk at luncheons

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Castle Howard, Yorkshire, England — Brideshead Revisited and the Ladder of Love

[Brideshead]

Excerpts from Letters to a Young Catholic, by George Weigel

Castle Howard in Yorkshire has been home to descen­dants of the fourth duke of Norfolk for more than three hundred years. This masterpiece of architecture, deco­ration, and landscaping is set in a thousand-acre park, replete with rolling lawns, lakes, a magnificent rose gar­den, and a great fountain; the fountain’s centerpiece is a Portland stone rendition of Atlas holding the earth on his shoulders. The main building, crowned by an ornate dome, borders three sides of a large landscaped court­yard. Going inside, you’ll find Chippendale and Shera­ton furniture, paintings by Gainsborough, Holbein, Joshua Reynolds, and Peter Paul Rubens, and statuary gathered from ancient Greece and Rome. Castle Howard got a lot of attention in the early 1980s when it was used in filming Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited. And while it seems that this remarkable coun­try estate was only one of several models for the fic­tional “Brideshead,” home to the aristocratic Flyte family, that really doesn’t matter. What counts is what hap­pened in a place like this, in Evelyn Waugh’s deeply Catholic imagination.

Brideshead Revisited is one of the few novels to be successfully “translated” into a film—in this case, a ten-hour British made-for-television extravaganza with an all-star cast: Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, Claire Bloom. I hope you’ll read the book and then watch the film. When you do, I think you’ll agree that Castle Howard/Brideshead is not simply the setting for much of the novel’s action and the film’s beauty. Through Waugh’s artistry and insight, it becomes a kind of Everyplace in which we can watch the unfold­ing of a Catholic conversion—a privileged place where we can watch a man learning to climb the ladder of love.

Waugh himself found that ladder a steep one. Ac­costed at a party by a formidable matron who asked him how he, a prominent Catholic convert, could be so rude, Waugh replied, “Madame, were it not for the Faith, I should scarcely be human.” Some might regard that as yet another example of Waugh’s extraordinary eccentric­ity—the kind of anarchic humor that once led him to ask a superior officer in the Royal Marines whether it was true that “in the Romanian army no one beneath the rank of Major is permitted to use lipstick”? But I don’t think so. For here is Waugh, in a more sober and reflec­tive moment, writing essentially the same thing about the steepness of the ladder of love to his friend and fel­low author, Edith Sitwell, when she was received into the Catholic Church:

Should I as Godfather warn you of probable shocks in the human aspect of Catholicism? Not all priests are as clever and kind as Father D’Arcy and Father Caraman. (The incident in my book of going to confession to a spy is a genuine experience.) But I am sure you know the world well enough to expect Catholic boors and prigs and crooks and cads. I always think to myself. “I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.” One of the joys of Catholic life is to recognize the little sparks of good everywhere, as well as the fire of the saints.

One way to think about Brideshead Revisited and its insight into Catholicism is to think of it as a story in which those small sparks of goodness are slowly fanned into the flame of genuine conversion—despite some hard resistance from the principal characters.

It will do scant justice to the richness of Waugh’s novel, but let me give you a desperately brief summary of the plot. The protagonist is Charles Ryder, a lonely, artisti­cally inclined young man who has been sent to Oxford by his determinedly off-hand father, his mother having died years before. There Ryder meets and befriends Sebastian Flyte, youngest son of Lord Marchmain, hereditary master of Brideshead. Sebastian, who carries a Teddy bear named Aloysius, is at the center of an Ox­onian circle of aesthetes and cranks. Yet even as he frit­ters away his Oxford days in four-hour lunches and drunken nocturnal escapades, Sebastian introduces Ry­der to the wonders of natural beauty and the intensity of adolescent male friendship. As that friendship un­folds, Sebastian brings Ryder on several occasions to Brideshead itself. There Charles, overwhelmed by the sensuousness of the place, undergoes what he calls a “conversion to the baroque.” The mystery of the Flyte family and its relationship to the Catholic Church in­tensifies when Sebastian, during summer break from university, takes Charles to meet his father, who lives in Venice with a wise and discerning mistress, having abandoned his wife and England after service in the First World War.

As Sebastian slowly sinks into alcoholism, Charles’s friendship with Sebastian’s beautiful sister, Julia, ripens—even as his relationship with the pious Lady Marchmain deteriorates. Stoically bearing her hus­band’s infidelity and hatred, Lady Marchmain has re­mained at Brideshead, where she spends hours a day in the art nouveau chapel Lord Marchmain built her as a wedding present. Her intense but humanly inept piety has an element of the tragic about it, suggests her younger daughter, Cordelia: “When people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy.” That turns out to be the case with Lord Marchmain himself, who returns to Brideshead after his wife’s death. Charles Ryder, who has become a successful painter, and Julia are now living together at the great house after the failure of their marriages: Julia’s to Rex Mottram, a soulless politician, and Ryder’s to Celia Mulcaster, the society-conscious sister of a boorish Oxford classmate. After his brittle elder son, Bridey, marries a not altogether attractive widow, Lord Marchmain decides to leave Brideshead.

[…]

In a Britain starved of luxuries during and after the Second World War, some read Brideshead as a nostalgic evocation of a more sumptuous past, even as others take the novel as further evidence for Waugh’s snobbery. All of these readings quite miss the main point. The theme of Brideshead Revisited is exactly what Waugh said it was in his preface to the revised edition: “the operation of di­vine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.” This is a novel about conversion, and con­version understood as a climb up the sometimes steep steps of the ladder of love.

Seen another way, Charles Ryder is a man who grows from lesser affections to harder, yet truer loves. Evelyn Waugh’s Catholic genius really kicks in, though, when we understand that Charles grows into the richest of loves—love for God in Christ—not merely from lesser loves but through them.

Starved of love as a boy by his cold, aloof father, he climbs one rung up the ladder of love through his friendship with Sebastian—even if that friendship in­volved a dalliance with what Ryder later describes as a “naughtiness… high in the catalogue of grave sins.” But the love that Charles and Sebastian share is an immature one, as Ryder himself admits; Oxford and the house at Brideshead and Venice with Sebastian were “a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood.” Sebast­ian, fearing the loss of that happy childhood, escapes into alcoholism (and finally finds a home as a sometimes drunk, sometimes sober lay doorman at a North African monastery). Sebastian’s own fear of adult love, and the responsibility it entails, doesn’t destroy his friendship with Ryder but limits its scope and depth.

Ryder’s love for Julia is higher and nobler than his love for Sebastian because it’s a love directed to a truer end—even though it’s an adulterous love on both sides. But this love, too, has it limits. It is also love-as-escape, the effort to create a new and solitary Arcadia with Julia at Brideshead, like the Arcadia that life at Oxford in the first flush of friendship with Sebastian had been. Yet even as they try to convince themselves that this is the genuine love for which they have been yearning, Julia seems ineffably and inexplicably sad; Bridey’s character­istically tactless (if accurate) remark about her “living in sin” with Charles sends her into a rage of anger and tears. Similar outbursts follow, and Julia slowly begins to recognize that, while her anger seems aimed at her lover, its real target is herself. The deathbed drama of Lord Marchmain crystallizes in both Julia and Charles the re­alization that their love, however deep, cannot be a new Arcadia—there is no escape to any such mythical para­dise from the truth about love and its demands. Recog­nizing that, Charles and Julia together take the next and even harder step up the ladder of love when, by mutual consent, they agree to part. Lesser loves have led to higher loves, and ultimately to a confrontation at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed with the Love that is the hardest, most brilliant of all—the love of God, manifest in Christ, which shows us the truth about ourselves and our loving.

I learned a lot of this from my friend Douglas Lane Patey, who teaches at Smith College and strikes me as Waugh’s most insightful literary interpreter. As Doug Patey once noted, Waugh intuitively understood the Catholic critique of modern sentimentality; he knew that love is not merely a feeling or sentiment, but rather a spiritual drive within us, a drive for communion, for “man is a being motivated by an inbuilt hunger for an adequate object of love.” Thus Waugh takes Charles Ry­der through a series of loves that form the stages of a spiritual ascent “from Sebastian through Julia to God. Each lesser love is real and valuable, but at the same time inadequate: each is a means pointing beyond itself to a more satisfactory end. And because the progression em­bodies a providential design, each is a seeming detour or retrogression than in fact constitutes an advance.”

This deeply Catholic reading of the spiritual life may help explain why some critics regard Brideshead as little more than an evocative period piece—and why the back cover of a recent Penguin paperback edition of the book gets it spectacularly, smashingly wrong when it sums up Charles Ryder’s journey as one in which he “finally comes to recognize his spiritual and social distance” from this “doomed Catholic family.” Once again, Pro­fessor Patey is an able guide when he suggests that Brideshead is, rather, the story of “a providential plan: a design by which, in the usual manner of providence, good is educed from ill, meaning from the seeming chaos of events.” Waugh, no fool, knew he was writing against the grain of modern sensibility by making divine providence the subtle engine of his story. Perhaps that’s why, in a brilliant set piece, he puts the contemporary skeptic’s view of Christianity in the mouth of a young, agnostic Charles Ryder, before Charles begins to feel the twitch of a divine pull on the thread of his own life. Thus Charles’s description of himself during the early phase of his relationship with the Flyte family:

I had no religion.… The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity bad long been exposed as a myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it; religion was a hobby which some people professed and others did not; at the best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of “complexes” and “inhibitions”—catchwords of the decade—and of the intolerance, hypocrisy, and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries. No one had ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent philosophical system and intransigent historical claims; nor, had they done, would I have been much interested.

Nor are some—perhaps many—“interested” today. And this brings into focus one of the great questions Brideshead puts squarely before you: Is life a permanent pleasure hunt, as so much of contemporary culture sug­gests (and as Charles Ryder once imagined)? Or is life a matter of learning-to-love? As I read it, Brideshead Revis­ited is a powerful invitation to invest in love. Which is, to be sure, a risky investment. But taking the risk of a gen­uine love, a love that attaches itself to what is truly wor­thy of the gift of one’s self, is the only way to satisfy that yearning for communion that is at the heart of our hu­manity. Hard as love can be, love is the only eternal real­ity—for God himself is Love.

I’d be misleading you if I suggested that any of this is easy. It isn’t, and Waugh knew it. That’s why Brideshead Revisited doesn’t smooth over the travail of climbing the ladder of love. During their idyllic Oxford days, Sebast­ian keeps telling Charles Ryder that he wishes it weren’t true: “I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense,” the skeptical Charles asks his friend about Catholicism. “Is it nonsense?” Sebastian replies, somberly. “I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”

A similar struggle with that challenging link between truth and love takes place in Ryder’s relationship with Julia. On the night that Bridey announces his engage­ment, he also mentions that his intended, a “woman of strict Catholic principle fortified by the prejudices of the middle class,” would never agree to being Charles and Julia’s guest at Brideshead. “I couldn’t possibly bring her here,” Bridey continues. “It is a matter of indifference to me whether you choose to live in sin with Rex or Charles or both—I have always avoided inquiry into the details of your menage—but in no case would Beryl con­sent to be your guest.” After Julia storms out of the room in tears, she calms herself and she and Charles walk out on the lawn to the great Adas fountain. Trying to distract Julia from Bridey’s comment, Ryder asks, “You do know at heart that it’s all bosh, don’t you?” “How I wish it was!” Julia replies; and then Charles re­members—“Sebastian once said almost the same thing to me.” But Charles still doesn’t understand the ferment in Julia’s soul. As they stand by the fountain, he tries an­other distracting conversational gambit: what they’ve been through that night, he suggests, is “like the setting of a comedy.” Or perhaps it was “Drama. Tragedy. What you will.”

[…]

It’s not enough to say “I take responsi­bility,” the ubiquitous catchall for not taking real re­sponsibility in our society. We have to take the conse­quences that go along with the responsibility, even if that means being pulled, yet again, up another steep rung on the ladder of love. In a society that isn’t alto­gether secure in saying “This is right” and “This is wrong,” period, “I take responsibility” is what irre­sponsible people often say to deflect attention from their irresponsibility—to change the subject, to get on with getting on. That’s not the way Christians climb the ladder of love. That’s not the way we become lovers who can live with Love for all eternity. That’s not how our sundry human comedies (and tragedies) are integrated into the divine comedy—“the love that moves the sun and the other stars,” as Dante ended the greatest poem ever.

Brideshead Revisited, the film, has a marvelous soundtrack composed by Geoffrey Burgon. Its elegiac main theme, whether rendered by flute, French horn, or a single muted trumpet, reminds us that love, while no easy busi­ness, is at the center of our humanity—and the Brideshead theme does that without descending into sentimentality. So does one of the great hymns of the Catholic tradition, Ubi caritas et amor, typically sung at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday while the priest washes the feet of a dozen congregants (as Jesus washed his disci­ples feet on their last night together), or during the con­gregation’s procession to holy communion. The text is a simple one:

Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Congregavit nos in unutn Christi amor. Exultemus, et in ipso iucundemur. Timeamus, et amemus Deum vivum, et ex corde diligamus nos sincere.

Where charity and love are, there God is. We have been brought together as one in the love of Christ. Let us exult and rejoice in him. May we fear and love the living God, and may we love with a sincere heart.

Take a moment now and listen to the setting of this ancient text by the modern French composer Maurice Durufle, who died in 1986; it’s the first of his Four Motets, opus 10. Faithful to the hymn’s foun­dations in Gregorian chant, Durufle marries this melodic line to a contemporary four-part harmony in which sopranos and altos, tenors and basses, remind each other, back and forth, that ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. The entire motet lasts less than two min­utes but captures, through some mysterious interplay of text and musical setting, everything we’ve been ex­ploring here: the human thirst for love, the struggle to find appropriate loves, the ladder of love to which Christ beckons us, the forgiveness of Christ that makes the ascent to truer loves possible, becoming the kind of lover who can love Love forever. I have often thought that I should like to listen to certain pieces of music on my deathbed (if God is kind enough to grant me a deathbed); Durufle’s Ubi caritas would certainly be one of them.

For here we really are at the center of the Catholic and Christian claim—that love is the most living thing there is, for God himself is love. This is “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” This is what makes us, and this is what we are made for—we are made for love, so that we may live with Love.

There’s another historic site in England where the bracing demands of love come into focus—the Tower of London, in the cell in which St. Thomas More lived for the last fifteen months of his life. You know his story from another great film, A Man for All Seasons. You may-remember the heart-wrenching scene in the final act, when More’s family is allowed into that cell to talk him into truckling to the king’s determination to make him­self head of the Church in England. More’s beloved daughter Margaret, whom he has taken care to educate in the classics, is designated to appeal to both her father’s heart and mind:

More: You want me to swear to the Act of Succession?

Margaret: “God more regards the thoughts of the heart than the words of the mouth.” Or so you’ve always told me.

More: Yes.

Margaret: Then say the words of the oath and in your heart think otherwise.

More: What is an oath but words we say to God?

Margaret: That’s very neat.

More: Do you mean it isn’t true? Margaret: No, it’s true.

More: Then it’s a poor argument to call it “neat,” Meg. When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his whole self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loathe to think your father one of them.

Margaret tries another tack, arguing that More is making himself into a hero. He parries that thrust easily enough—with the world being what it is, “why then per­haps we must stand fast a little, even at the risk of being heroes.” Margaret, close to tears, then cries out: “But in reason! Haven’t you done as much as God can reason­ably want?” To which More replies, haltingly, “Well … finally … it isn’t a matter of reason; finally it’s a matter of love.”

Love of what? Of truth, I suggest—the truth with which Christ seizes our lives. And what is that truth? It is the truth that we have come from love, that we have been redeemed by an infinite love, and that we are des­tined for an eternity of love with Love itself. In the final analysis, this isn’t something that’s settled by rationality, by argument. It’s settled, in an often unsetding way, by Someone. It’s a matter of being seized by the Truth who is Love—the Love that became incarnate in the world in Jesus of Nazareth, especially in his suffering, death, and resurrection.

To be seized by the truth mirrored in the face of Christ, and to love that truth with everything we have in us, is emphatically not something we do by ourselves. We meet Christ in his Church, which Catholicism often calls the “mystical body of Christ.” The Church, as you well know, is a very earthen vessel, full of cracks and fis­sures. Learning about that can also be a step up the lad­der of love; let me give you an example.

When I was a boy, our parish pastor was a kind of godlike figure to me. A “late vocation,” he had been a Princeton classmate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, had made money on Wall Street, and seemed to know everyone worth knowing. He’d been close to my paternal grand­parents and was a frequent guest in our home. When, during high school, I discovered that he was an alcoholic I was devastated. That devastation turned, I must con­fess, to the feelings of contempt that come from learning abruptly about an idol’s clay feet, especially during those adolescent years with their painful combination of cer­tainties and uncertainties.

I rarely saw this man in my twenties. But in 1987,1 was returning to my old parish to lecture on my first major book, and I somehow got it into my head that I should visit him at the retirement home where he was then living—or, more precisely, dying of throat cancer. His condition made it difficult to talk, but we managed a fifteen-minute conversation and I gave him a copy of the book, assuming that he was too ill to come to my lecture. When I was taking my leave, he asked me to come closer. Reaching up from his wheelchair to draw me into a half embrace, he whispered, in his cancer-hoarsened voice, “You know that I have always loved your family.” I couldn’t hold back the tears and told him that now I knew. That night, he staggered on a cane into the back of the parish hall.

[…]

@темы: books, religion

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"The claim that ‘he [Waugh] longed for some home …” is in CM. Bowra, Memories,..."

[Brideshead]

“The claim that ‘he [Waugh] longed for some home …” is in CM. Bowra, Memories, 1898-1939 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 175. ‘Ir is not given to all her sons…’: Waugh, A Little Learning, 167. Harold Acton’s view of Brideshead Revisited is raken from Carpenter, TJte Brideshead Generation, 371. In Rintoul, Dictionary of Real People, 141, Chrisopher Sykes states that friends of Waugh identified Blanche with Acton because of the cosmopolitan background, Eton education and larger-than-life character. Moreover, sayings of Acton were put into Blanche’s mouth. Both Waugh and Acton denied the identification, however. It is true that the characters in my novels often wrongly identified with Harold Acton were to a great extent drawn from [Brian Howard]’, Waugh commented in A Little Learning, 204. Howard, who was an old Etonian aesthete with part-Jewish origins, used the affectation my dear’, like Blanche. (He was also supposedly the model for Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags [1942]). See also Alan Bold and Robert Giddings, Who Was Really Who in Fiction (Longman, 1987), 33; and Carpenter, Tlie Brideshead Generation, 356. ‘It would be of course absurd…’: Christopher Hollis, Oxford in the Twenties (Heinemann, 1976), 92.”

- Oxford in English Literature
The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens
by John Dougill

@темы: i am not i, anthony blanche

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"For Sebastian’s championing of butterfly and flower over arc and architecture, see Waugh,..."

[Brideshead]

“For Sebastian’s championing of butterfly and flower over arc and architecture, see Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 37. ‘Nature is so close…’ is the opening line of Auden’s ‘Oxford’: see Antonia Fraser, ed., Oxford and Oxfordshire in Verse (Seeker and Warburg, 1982), 55. Another version exists in Auden’s Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (Faberand Faber, 1991). 147, which begins, ‘Nature invades: old rooks in each college garden / Still talk, like agile babies, the language of feeling’. “The city’s cloistral hush’ is from Waugh, BridesheadRevisited, 30, and Ryder moving through a world of piety’, ibid, 71.”

- Oxford in English Literature
The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens
by John Dougill

@темы: motifs

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"As regards ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, the subject was first treated as a painting by Guernico,..."

[Brideshead]

“As regards ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, the subject was first treated as a painting by Guernico, and Poussin painted two pictures on a similar theme named The Arcadian Shepherds. ТЪе second of these, the most famous, apparently provided the inspiration for Waugh’s choice of tide for the Oxford section. The inference he drew from the painting is unclear, for the ego’ of the title could be understood in different ways. In the earlier painting there is a comb and skull with the implication that ‘Even in Arcadia, there am 1—Death’. In this case the pleasure-seeking idyll of Charles and Sebastian is inevitably doomed by the shadow of death. In the second painting, however, Poussin omits the skull, and the shepherds reflect in melancholy manner on the tomb of a forebear. ‘Ihis has been interpreted by the art historian Panofsky as a shift of focus, with the words ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ spoken by the dead ancestor to signify he has entered a paradise. In this case the suggestion would be that worldly happiness is only a temporary illusion.”

- Oxford in English Literature
The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens
by John Dougill

@темы: arcadia

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"The ugly, subdued little College”: Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (Penguin, 1937), 211. The..."

[Brideshead]

“The ugly, subdued little College”: Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (Penguin, 1937), 211. The model for Sebastian Flyte comes from Rintoul, Dictionary of Real People, 455, though Christopher Sykcs in Evelyn Waugh (Collins, 1975), 252, suggests that the model for Sebastian Flyte may have been the charming aristocrat Hugh Lygon (1904-36) of Pembroke College, whose career was plagued by illness, or Alastair Graham (b. 1904) of Brasenose since the original manuscript of Brideshead Revisited sometimes has Alastair in place of Sebastian. From 1933 Graham became a recluse on the Welsh coast. Sebastian’s ‘nursery freshness’ and ‘It seems to me that I grew younger…’ are from Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 56.”

- Oxford in English Literature
The Making, and Undoing, of the English Athens
by John Dougill

@темы: sebastian, i am not i

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From Grimes to Brideshead: the early novels of Evelyn Waugh

[Brideshead]

From Grimes to Brideshead: the early novels of Evelyn Waugh:

Robert Reginald Garnett

Bucknell University Press, 1990

@темы: books, links

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davebloom: More pictures from Oxford, specifically from Christ...

[Brideshead]

The Great Quadrangle


Hallway


Dining Hall


Henry VIII


Place Setting


Cathedral

davebloom:

More pictures from Oxford, specifically from Christ Church:

• The college’s Great Quadrangle is basically postcard-ready on a nice day (and we had a nice day). Since weirdly-cropped photos play havoc with Tumblr’s slideshow feature, I’m posting this alternate version (which, through no fault of mine, practically looks like a Magritte with the guard in the bowler, etc.):

• I kept snapping pictures of hallways and such with the hopes that (dork alert) we’d ultimately recognize an area that ended up in a Harry Potter movie (which filmed here). Inconclusive results, which serves me right, since I was taking photos of a college that produced countless important philosophers, writers, and politicians with the hopes of figuring out where Snape looked at Ron funny that one time (or something). Still - look at this hallway! People go to school in this place!


• Again, people go to school in this place! They eat in this dining hall, which is lined with portraits of alumni and other notables from British history, including…


• Henry VIII, who knew a thing or two about eating. (And also formally refounded the school as “King Henry VIII’s College” after an earlier, unsuccessful attempt at creating a school on the grounds, then later made it the cathedral of the diocese of Oxford when England broke from the Church of Rome).


• I ate off of plastic trays in college. Just sayin’.


• And here’s the cathedral proper - one of the smallest cathedrals in England, but still pretty impressive, especially when you consider some of the folks who spent time there.

@темы: oxford

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Reblog with your favourite Brideshead Revisited quote

[Brideshead]

“I don’t want to make it easier for you,” I said; “I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.”

Not the favourite quote, but then again, can anyone name just one?

@темы: I like getting drunk at luncheons

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tonguedepressors: Pietro Perugino (1448-1523) - San...

[Brideshead]

tonguedepressors:

Pietro Perugino (1448-1523) - San Sebastian

ca. 1489-90

174 cm

@темы: sebastian, motifs, st sebastian, religion

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And his voice, too, was Sebastian's

[Brideshead]

Sebastian says: Mister Ryder? Mister Ryder? Charles drinks champagne at all hours.

And then: "Charles?" said Sebastian. "Charles? Mister Ryder, to you, child."

While lord Marchmain speaks like this: "Match-boxes," he said. "Match-boxes. I think she's past child-bearing."

@темы: let me explain them to you, bubbles

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Queer fish

[Brideshead]

Anthony Blanche tells Charles: Of course, I didn't know it was Sebastian--there were some rather queer fish, my dear, in and out of my little apartment. Who knows better than you my taste for queer fish?

Then Cordelia says: 'We see some queer fish'" - Cordelia lapsed again into mimicry; " 'he was a queer fish, but he was very earnest.'

@темы: let me explain them to you, bubbles

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“My sister’s very pompous to-night,” said Sebastian, when she was gone. ...

[Brideshead]

“My sister’s very pompous to-night,” said Sebastian, when she was gone.
“I don’t think she cares for me,” I said.
“I don’t think she cares for anyone much. I love her. She’s so like me.”
“Do you? Is she?”
“In looks I mean and the way she talks. I wouldn’t love anyone with a character like mine.”

…

”I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,” I said. “I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.”
“Is she? Do you? I’m glad. I don’t like her either. Why did you marry her?”

@темы: let me explain them to you, bubbles

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Photo

[Brideshead]

@темы: waugh

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fuckyeahbridesheadrevisited: Brideshead Revisited the...

[Brideshead]

fuckyeahbridesheadrevisited:

Brideshead Revisited the DOCUMENTARY. On the mini series. Featuring practically the entire cast.

5 parts on Youtube.

@темы: mini-series, films