contra mundum
четверг, 14 апреля 2011
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Gosh… want, want, want.
This was Waugh’s first ever published book. Pre-Raphaelite style. *_*
среда, 13 апреля 2011
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“The slothful are inwardly unwilling to be moved; they arc stuck between a self they cannot bear and a self they can’t bear to become. Their outward behavior—sluggishness and inertia—reflects the state of their heart.
On the other hand, if we think we can escape from sorrow, we will pour all our energy into any form of flight that shows promise, no matter how desperate. Phil’s life of shallow pleasure-seeking and seduction early in the film is his attempt to escape love’s demands. Life becomes one long project of distracting ourselves from the truth about our predicament. Augustine famously said that we would be “restless” until we find our “rest in [God).” Blaise Pascal agreed; he predicted that the best way to make people truly miserable would be to takeaway all their diversions, whether at work or through recreation: “Without [diversions] we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.” Victor Frankl paints a similar portrait of the workaholic’s “Sunday neurosis”—the vacuum of meaning she feels on the day when her work does not fulfill its distracting function every waking hour. Sadly, this escapist strategy can take even ostensibly pious forms: we can spend our whole lives avoiding the demands of true disciple-ship, love, commitment, and change, even if we constantly and busily engage in lots of religious activities. Like the aptly named Sebastian “Flyte” in Brideshead Revisited, the restlessness that characterizes our escapist strategies betrays a heart not at peace with who we really are and makes us flee whatever a commitment to love would require of us. This is why the vice of sloth was traditionally opposed to the commandment to rest on the Sabbath, which Aquinas says requires that “the soul take rest in God alone.”
Sloth can thus show itself in the total inertia of the couch potato or the restless distractions of endless activity. Somewhere in between these two symptoms of vice is a holy Sabbath rest for the heart that has given itself utterly to God, a heart overjoyed, not oppressed, by the thought that “love so amazing, so divine, demands my self, my life, my all.”
The slothful person ultimately insists on his own way, his own will, his own self-made pseudo-rest. His lack of commitment speaks of an unwillingness to surrender himself to God.”
- Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
On the other hand, if we think we can escape from sorrow, we will pour all our energy into any form of flight that shows promise, no matter how desperate. Phil’s life of shallow pleasure-seeking and seduction early in the film is his attempt to escape love’s demands. Life becomes one long project of distracting ourselves from the truth about our predicament. Augustine famously said that we would be “restless” until we find our “rest in [God).” Blaise Pascal agreed; he predicted that the best way to make people truly miserable would be to takeaway all their diversions, whether at work or through recreation: “Without [diversions] we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.” Victor Frankl paints a similar portrait of the workaholic’s “Sunday neurosis”—the vacuum of meaning she feels on the day when her work does not fulfill its distracting function every waking hour. Sadly, this escapist strategy can take even ostensibly pious forms: we can spend our whole lives avoiding the demands of true disciple-ship, love, commitment, and change, even if we constantly and busily engage in lots of religious activities. Like the aptly named Sebastian “Flyte” in Brideshead Revisited, the restlessness that characterizes our escapist strategies betrays a heart not at peace with who we really are and makes us flee whatever a commitment to love would require of us. This is why the vice of sloth was traditionally opposed to the commandment to rest on the Sabbath, which Aquinas says requires that “the soul take rest in God alone.”
Sloth can thus show itself in the total inertia of the couch potato or the restless distractions of endless activity. Somewhere in between these two symptoms of vice is a holy Sabbath rest for the heart that has given itself utterly to God, a heart overjoyed, not oppressed, by the thought that “love so amazing, so divine, demands my self, my life, my all.”
The slothful person ultimately insists on his own way, his own will, his own self-made pseudo-rest. His lack of commitment speaks of an unwillingness to surrender himself to God.”
- Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
"[Harold Acton] was accommodated in his college, Christ Church, not in the ‘coveted rooms in..."
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“[Harold Acton] was accommodated in his college, Christ Church, not in the ‘coveted rooms in Tom Quad, Peckwater or Canterbury’, but in the “grimly Victorian Gothic’ Meadow Building, erected to the designs of the Ruskinian architects Thomas Deane & Son in 1863. From this he took his inspiration. ‘I painted my rooms lemon yellow and filled them with Victorian bric-a-brac - artificial flowers and fruit and lumps of glass, a collection of paperweights imprisoning bubbles that never broke and flowers that never faded.’ Acton was soon imitated - both in life and in literature. Around him gathered acolytes such as Robert Byron, Brian Howard, Osbert Lancaster and Henry Yorke. In literature his rooms were memorialised as those occupied by Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), rooms which contained ‘a strange jumble of objects - a harmonium in a gothic case, an elephant’s foot waste-paper basket, a dome of wax fruit, two disproportionately large Sevres vases’.”
- The Victorians since 1901: histories, representations and revisions
by Miles Taylor, Michael Wolff
- The Victorians since 1901: histories, representations and revisions
by Miles Taylor, Michael Wolff
"Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited shows that the novelists can be unpleasant too, with the..."
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“Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited shows that the novelists can be unpleasant too, with the rudeness of a schoolboy. His opening chapters are brilliantly puerile, with Sebastian Flyte and his friend Charles Ryder as snobbish undergraduates at Oxford in the golden 1920s. But for me the story descends to concern with Sebastian’s failure as a son in a wealthy Roman Catholic family and as a man, the breakdown of his character in alcoholism, decay, ultimate damnation.
It is the same problem that so gready disturbed E. M. Forster —the inability of England’s sons to grow up. Forster called it “the undeveloped heart.” The Times Literary Supplement calls it “a traditional English malady.” Cyril Connolly called it a Theory of Permanent Adolescence. In America we call it the Peter Pan “I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up” or Little Boy Blue syndrome, of those who remain schoolboys for life.
Sebastian clings to his nanny and his teddy bear, a lost child disposed of by Waugh.”
- The third and only way: reflections on staying alive
by Helen Smith Bevington
It is the same problem that so gready disturbed E. M. Forster —the inability of England’s sons to grow up. Forster called it “the undeveloped heart.” The Times Literary Supplement calls it “a traditional English malady.” Cyril Connolly called it a Theory of Permanent Adolescence. In America we call it the Peter Pan “I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up” or Little Boy Blue syndrome, of those who remain schoolboys for life.
Sebastian clings to his nanny and his teddy bear, a lost child disposed of by Waugh.”
- The third and only way: reflections on staying alive
by Helen Smith Bevington
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That, as Waugh wrote elsewhere, ‘German bombs have made but a negligible addition to the sum of our own destructiveness is a familiar refrain in his later work.’As in Woolf s Between the Acts, and counter to the official strain of anti-conservative and socially reformist rhetoric of the wartime administration, the war here becomes a fight for the preservation of a sanitised past.
Of course, Waugh identified rural England with the aristocracy, with the country estate and its privileged way of life, in a way that Woolf struggled to avoid. Infamously, the problem with Brideshead Revisited is that the narrator’s veneration of the feudal order is to be taken at face value; Waugh said as much when he retrospectively called the novel a ‘panegyric’ over the aristocracy’s ‘empty coffin’. Anticipating a debate that would become very familiar in the years after the war - that more will mean worse - Viscount Esher wrote an article for Horizon in 1942 that prefigured the novel’s elegiac mood:
The first effect of a transference of wealth is a levelling down, and not as the optimists hoped, a levelling up. If there is to be only one class on the railways, it is the first-class that disappears, and everybody goes third. As the minimum standard of life for the poor has been raised by the social services, the burden of taxation from which to create those services has lowered the standard of life for the rich. Under this process the ultimate and perfect expression of English aristocratic culture, the country-house life, has declined, and must disappear.
It would be a stretch to suggest that, since Waugh had likely read this article (as a reader of and regular correspondent to Horizon) Viscount Esher’s railway analog}’ is being rendered quite literally when the narrator and Lord Sebastian Flyte travel third-class to Venice on the money intended for Sebastian’s first-class journey. The principle is certainly the same one, even if, in an almost predictable Second World War irony, it is Viscount Esher, the aristocrat, who finally concedes that the ‘levelling down is going to be worthwhile - not an argument Waugh was ever likely to advance.
That said, Brideshead Revisited makes it hard to ignore the self-hating qualities of Waugh’s nostalgia, coded as a ruinous straightness of sexual and artistic ambition on the narrator’s part. Not only does the middle-class protagonist contribute to the wrecking of the dynastic and aristocratic dream when he tries to get inside it by marrying Sebastian’s sister, but he is simultaneously there as an artist cashing in on the loss by memorialising it. What emerge from this are the inconsistent politics of the self-deluded and the mediocre art of the conservative in retreat from modernity:
The financial slump of the period, which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success, which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom. I published three splendid folios - Ryder s Country Seats, Ryder’s English Homes, and Ryder’s Village and Provincial Architecture, which each sold its thousand copies at five guineas apiece.
So the would-be modernist artist ends up producing coffee-table books that might be ungenerously described as the visual equivalent of Waugh’s own novel, a lucrative and parasitic art predicated on the snobberies of not just the house owners (whose loss was presumably real enough in human terms), but those of a voyeuristic public. In a misfiring metaphor of stunningly appropriate bathos, Ryder likens his first visit to Brideshead Castle to ‘a glimpse only, such as might be had from the top of an omnibus into a lighted ballroom*, and the aristocratic Sebastian Flyte has no compunction about reminding Charles of his tourist status, and responds to his friend’s desire to see more of the glories of Brideshead Castle with the put-down that *On Queen Alexandra’s Day it’s all open for a shilling’ (BR, 38).
Their common friend James Lees-Milne tells an anecdote in his memoir of Henry Green which points unflatteringly to the Brideshead demographic - himself an architectural conservator and an arch-snob, Lees-Milne was well placed to recognise social pretensions when he saw them:
I saw Caught in Heywood Hill’s bookshop where Nancy Mitford was then working. She was amazed that I did not realize Henry Green was really Henry Yorke (indeed, it was a difficult thing to grasp). At a luncheon party Nancy remarked in her languid Mitford voice that if only Henry had spelt the title Court and written about royalty and the aristocracy instead of firemen the novel would, in those days of austerity when everyone pounced upon books recalling glamour and glitter, have sold like hot cakes.
The modernist survivor Anthony Blanche gets to point out what an artistically worthless activity this aspirational fluff really is: ‘the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis … your art, my dear - is a dean’s daughter in flowered muslin (BR, 272). Ryder’s (and Waugh’s) efforts at tragic grandeur are rendered ridiculous, literally parochial, a middlebrow commercialism in the style of their contemporary John Betjeman, rather than the high tragedy to which the book’s refrain of ‘quomodo sedet sola civitas’ aspires (BRt220, 237, 351). ‘I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred’, Blanche tells Ryder, ‘English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals’ (BR, 271). If there’s anything to redeem this book from what the heritage industry turned it into, and even what Waugh surely intended it to be, it’s the layer of self-criticism provided by this blast from the cosmopolitan modernist past: ‘part Gallic, part Yankee, part, perhaps, Jew; wholly exotic’. As if the novel were rebelling against itself, this character turns up periodically in both of Waugh’s wartime novels to point out that class-bound and chauvinistic insularity isn’t going to be enough.
вторник, 12 апреля 2011
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Cross-dressing
Before World War I, aesthetic figures like Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke had expressed their independence from the Establishment by wearing more color and softening the silhouette of their clothes. They wore soft turn-down collars and enormous ties. In the twenties, playwright and songwriter Noel Coward indulged in “a long suppressed desire for silk pyjamas and underclothes” after the roaring success of his first play, The Vortex, in 1924. He also took to wearing “coloured turtle-neck jerseys, actually more for comfort than for effect, and soon I [Coward] was informed by my evening paper that I had started a fashion.”
While men pampered themselves and softened up their wardrobes, some women went for a harsher look.
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While he was a pupil at lancing, Evelyn Waugh tried to start a discussion on the subject of homosexuality. As an editorial in the school newspaper, he published a ficti tious conversation between a visitor and a schoolboy like him. lie wanted to show that passionate friendships between pupils were not necessarily disruptive or corrupting, and that the authorities were wrong to intervene in an area that did not concern them
A few years before, his brother Alec had launched a great offensive against the public schools through his acclaimed novel, The Loom of Youth (1917).?w In a less well-known work, Public-School Life. Boys, Parents, Masters (1922) he gives a very detailed description ol homosexuality in the public schools, defends romantic friendships and denounces the hypocrisy that surrounded the subject. Noting that the system of the public schools is (in this respect) contrary to nature, he says that one must expect results contrary to nature. He calls the time spent in public school a phase of sexual transition; and says that most of the “active immorality in the schools” takes place between fifteen-and sixteen-year-old boys; not, as is frequently imagined, between the younger and older boys.” He says that, like everything else at school, homosexuality has to conform to rules; there arc rules for everything, and friendships, like personalities, must fit the mold. It is the endless talk about homosexuality that keeps interest alive and ensures that the phenomenon will be reproduced.
Waugh also highlights some neglected aspects of homosexual life in the public schools. First of all, having 18 or 19 year old boys in some of the houses can only create a difficult climate, for at this age sexual impulses more definitely demand physical satisfaction. Then, romantic friendships can have harmful consequences for the younger boys. A young one who becomes the friend of an older boy finds himself suddenly propelled to the top of the school hierarchy; he gets to know other boys in the upper forms, and he receives various privileges; boys in Iris own form become jealous or hate him, and he loses contact with reality. When his guardian leaves the school, he finds himself alone and unwanted. Moreover, constantly separating love from sex can cause trouble for the lads later in life. To change this situation, Waugh became an advocate of coeducation; he called for a freer discussion of these subjects, and for better public information:
- There is so much ignorance to dissipate; the ignorance of the mothers, the ignorance of the fathers who have not themselves been in public school, the conspiracy of silence among the pupils, alumni and masters. We make too much of immorality, and at the same time we do not pay enough attention to it. The headmasters assure us that it only crops up occasionally, but their attitude is like that of a doctor who suspects his patient lias a grave illness and simply goes on observing him, looking for signs.
These attempts to start a discussion of homosexuality were not the only ones and it wasn’t only the pupils who were concerned.
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“The center of aesthetic and homosexual activity was the Club of Hypocrites, where young men danced together — in spite of prohibitions, Evelyn Waugh explains that its members were known — not only for their drunkenness, hut also for the flamboyance of their costumes and their manners, which were in certain cases obviously homosexual. The George Restaurant was also a meeting place for Oxford homosexuals during the inter war period. The most flamboyant homosexuality at Oxford was embodied by two aesthetes, Harold Acton and Brian Howard, who had already been together in Eton from 1918 to 1922. Their homosexuality was aggressive, pretentious, and based primarily on style, posing, effect. Similarly, their “aestheticism” was intended to be a philosophy of life, a literary and artistic viewpoint, and not solely a sartorial caprice. Acton and Howard were at the avant-garde of an Oxonian aestheticism which strove to be in touch with the modern world and not locked up in a dusty fin de-siecle cult. In distinction to their com rades, who concentrated on cultivating their uniqueness while never venturing beyond their own rooms and by associating only with certain carefully selected people, they met enormous numbers of people and made a name for themselves through their social talent and their journalistic or poetic writings, and they organized a propaganda campaign for their “movement.” Martin Green describes them as “children of the sun” (Sonnenkinder) who refused to grow up after the war and who embodied all the adolescent arrogance at the heart of the Oxonian homosexual myth. Evelyn Waugh saw Brian Howard as an “incorrigible homosexual,” and his total lack of shame frightened him. The aesthetes made no mystery of their homosexuality, but it was not so much that as their affectations and the sense of their artistic superiority which earned them the hatred of the athletes. And if the hostility between the two camps frequently led to the ransacking of the aesthetes’ rooms by tipsy athletes, it was more a means of defense against a lifestyle and sexual ori¬entation that was beginning to submerge them than a witch hunt organized against the untouchables. Homosexuality may still have been under attack, but it was already recognized.”
- A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, volume I & II
by Florence Tamagne
- A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, volume I & II
by Florence Tamagne
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“However, after the war, Noel Annan noted that “homosexuality has become normal.” Evelyn Waugh is one of the more striking examples of the homosexual trend in Oxford in those days. Isaiah Berlin remembers having seen him on a settee of the Club of Hypocrites kissing a friend, and Christopher Hollis knew him to have had at least two major homosexual relationships, one with Richard Pares, the other with Alastair Graham. However, Waugh married upon graduating from the university and claimed, afterwards, to hate homosexuals. Nevertheless the implications of this university homo sexual activity are undeniable.597 While homosexuality continued to be illegal under English law, it suddenly became the ideal for cultivated youth. The heterosexual poet Louis MacNeice comments that he discovered that, at Oxford, “homosexuality and intelligence, heterosexuality and musculature went hand in hand.” lie remained an outsider, and turned to drinking.”
- A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, volume I & II
by Florence Tamagne
- A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, volume I & II
by Florence Tamagne
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The social Voyage and Return
We have so far looked at Voyage and Return stories almost entirely in terms of those where the hero or heroine makes some kind of physical journey into an unfamiliar world.
There are other, less obvious versions of this plot where the journey is of a rather different kind: as where, for instance, it takes its central figure into an unfamiliar social milieu. An author particularly drawn to this type of plot was Evelyn Waugh, several of whose best-known novels are shaped by the Voyage and Return theme. A fairly conventional example, not dissimilar to those we have already looked at in that it involves a physical journey into another country, is Scoop (1938) (which also has a Rags to Riches element, in showing how its obscure little hero, a shy writer of nature notes, finally pulls off an amazing journalistic scoop and becomes a national hero).
Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), however, was an example of what may be called a purely ‘social* Voyage and Return story. Paul Pennyfeather, a dull, ordinary undergraduate, suddenly finds himself ejected from his cosy, humdrum existence when he is helplessly caught up in the consequences of an upper-class brawl and sent down from Oxford. He first finds himself among the semi-grotesques of the seedy private school of Llanabba, and is then swept up into the even stranger and more exotic world of Margot Best-Chetwynde, a fabulously rich upper-class *older woman* who somewhat implausibly decides she wants to marry him. Like Alice or the Time Traveller or many other central figures in Voyage and Return stories, Pennyfeather is caught up in events largely beyond his control - a bewildering dream which eventually turns to nightmare when he is convicted of having, quite unwittingly, been an agent in Mrs Best-Chetwynde’s international ‘white slave* ring. He is sent to prison, whence he is rescued by his now ex-fiancee to undergo an operation which gives him a new identity. He ends up returning to Oxford under a different name, to sink back into exactly the kind of dull, anonymous student existence from which he had been plucked at the start of the story.
In some ways a similar, though much more developed version of this story came twenty years later in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Again a fairly ordinary middle-class Oxford undergraduate, Charles Ryder, finds himself abruptly plucked out of his humdrum routine into an exotic upper-class world, this time that of Lord Sebastian Flyte and his family’s great house Brideshead. Ryder’s initial exhilaration at being introduced to this romantic other-world is gradually overshadowed as Sebastian slides into incurable alcoholism; only to be revived by a second ‘dream stage’ when Charles embarks on a love-affair with Sebastian’s sister Julia. This in turn becomes shadowed as Julia’s father, the Earl Marchmain, dies, and Julia refuses to go ahead with her planned marriage to Charles. Thus rejected, the hero leaves the ‘faery world’ of Brideshead forever - until, in totally different circumstances, he unexpectedly finds himself back at the house as an army officer in World War Two, and recalls his Voyage and Return experience in a prolonged flashback.
Such a ‘remembrance of times past’, prompted by the activation of memory and conveyed through some kind of flashback, is not unfamiliar as the framework for a Voyage and Return story. The analogy between a journey into the past and one into another country is even made explicit in the opening lines of L. R Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953): ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.
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DEATHBED SCENE at the mil of Brideshead Revisited is shown here at sketched by Artist Alajalov for Town & Country magazine. In this climactic episode the dying Lord Marchmain rights for life in the elaborate and opulently furnished Chinese room of his ancestral estate, Brideshead. For days he rebuffs the efforts of a priest to administer final absolution. But an instant before he breathes his last, the proud old nobleman, who once embraced Catholicism because of his wife and later repudiated it and lived abroad with a mistress, makes the sign of the Cross and returns to his adopted faith.
Posted in LIFE magazine along with Evelyn Waugh’s response to the feedback he received.
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EVELYN WAUGH, ‘LIFE’ (INTERNATIONAL: CHICAGO)
8 April 1946, 53-4, 56, 58, 60
FAN-FARE
A distinguished English novelist, finding his latest book a best-seller, explains himself and his works to his new American admirers
by EVELYN WAUGH
An аnswer to the ladies all over the U.S.A. (and to the man) who hate been kind enough to write to Evelyn Waugh about his recent novel, “Brideshead Revisited”:
FREQUENTLY, unobtrusively, in the last 17 years I have had books published in the United States of America. No one noticed them. A parcel would appear on my breakfast table containing a familiar work with a strange wrapper and sometimes a strange title; an item would recur in my agent’s accounts: “Unearned advance on American edition,” and that was the end of the matter. Now, unseasonably, like a shy waterfowl who has hatched out a dragon’s egg, I find that I have written a “best-seller.” “Unseasonably,” because the time has passed when the event brings any substantial reward. In a civilized age this unexpected moment of popularity would have endowed me with a competency for life. But perhaps in a civilized age I should not be so popular. As it is the politicians confiscate my earnings and I am left with the correspondence.
This is something new to me, for Englishwomen do not write letters to men they do not know; indeed they seldom write letters to anyone nowadays; they are too hard-driven at home. Even before the war English readers were seldom seen or heard. It is true that there are facilities for writers whose vanity so inclines them to join literary associations, make speeches and even expose themselves to view at public luncheons, but no one expects it of them or respects them for it. Instead of the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity of the Americas, Europe offers its artists Liberty, Diversity and Privacy. Perhaps it is for this that so many of the best American writers go abroad. But, as Hitler observed, there are no islands in the modern world. I have momentarily become an object of curiosity to Americans and I find that they believe that my friendship and confidence are included in the price of my book.
Try and spot a novelist
My father taught me that it was flagitious to leave a letter of any kind unanswered. (Indeed his courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.) I therefore eagerly accept this chance of answering collectively all the cordial inquiries I have received. Please believe me, dear ladies, it is not sloth or “snootiness” that prevents my writing to you individually. It is simply that I cannot afford it. The royalty on your copy, by the time I have paid my taxes, literally does not leave me the price of a stamp.
You require to know what I look like? Well, I am 42 years of age, in good health, stockily built—no, I really cannot go on. Let me merely say that the tailors and hairdressers and hosiers of the small parish of St. James’s, London do all they can to render a naturally commonplace appearance completely inconspicuous. Stand on the pavement and scan the aquarium-faces which pass and gape and pass again in my club window; try and spot a novelist. You will not spot me. I once had an intellectual friend who complained that my appearance was noticeable in Bloomsbury. But I seldom leave St. James’s when I am in London, and I seldom go to London at all. I live in a shabby stone house in the country, where nothing is under a hundred years old except the plumbing and that does not work. I collect old books in an inexpensive, desultory way. I have a fast-emptying cellar of wine and gardens fast reverting to jungle. I am very contentedly married. I have numerous children whom I see once a day for ten, I hope, awe-inspiring minutes. In the first ten years of adult life I made a large number of friends. Now on the average I make one new one a year and lose two. It is all quite dull, you see; nothing here is worth the poke of a sightseer’s sunshade.
No prophet and no hack
It was not always thus with me. In youth I gadded about, and in those years and in the preposterous years of the Second World War I collected enough experience to last several lifetimes of novel writing. If you hear a novelist say he needs to collect “copy,” be sure he is no good. Most of the great writers led very quiet lives; when, like Cervantes, they were adventurous, it was not for professional reasons. When I gadded, among savages and people of fashion and politicians and crazy generals, it was because I enjoyed them. I have settled down now because I ceased to enjoy them and because I have found a much more abiding interest—the English language. My father, who was a respected literary critic of his day, first imbued me with the desire to learn this language, of which he had a mastery. It is the most lavish and delicate which mankind has ever known. It is in perpetual danger of extinction and has survived so far by the combination of a high civilized society, where it was spoken and given its authority and sanctity, with a thin line of devotees who made its refinement and adornment their life’s work. The first of these is being destroyed; if the thing is to be saved it will be by the second. I did not set out to be a writer. My first ambition was to paint. I had little talent but I enjoyed it as, I believe, many very bad writers enjoy writing. I spent some time at an art school which was not as wantonly wasted as it seemed then. Those hours with the plaster casts taught me to enjoy architecture, just as the hours with the Greek paradigms, now forgotten, taught me to enjoy reading English. I have never, until quite lately, enjoyed writing. I am lazy and it is intensely hard work. I wanted to be a man of the world and I took to writing as I might have taken to archaeology or diplomacy or any other profession, as a means of coming to terms with the world. Now I see it as an end in itself. Most European writers suffer a climacteric at the age ol 40. Youthful volubility carries them so far. After that they either become prophets or hacks or esthetes. (American writers, I think-nearly all become hacks.) I am no prophet and, I hope, no hack.
That, I think, answers the second question so often put to me in the last few weeks: “When can we expect another Brideshead Revisited?” Dear ladies, never. I can never hope to engage your attention again in quite the same way. I have already shaken off one of the American critics, Mr. Edmund Wilson, who once professed a generous interest in me. He was outraged (quite legitimately by his standards) at finding God introduced into my story. I believe that you can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions. Countless admirable writers, perhaps some of the best in the world, succeed in this. Henry James was the last of them. The failure of modern novelists since and including James Joyce is one of presumption and exorbitance. They are not content with the artificial figures which hitherto passed so gracefully as men and women. They try to represent the whole human mind and soul anil yet omit its determining character—that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose.
So in my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God.
You, Mrs. Schultz, arc an individual
But before we part company there are other questions you ask which Г will try to answer. A lady in Hempstead, N. Y. asks me whether 1 consider my characters “typical.” No, Mrs. Schultz, I do not. It i.s horrible of you to ask. A novelist has no business with types; they are the property of economists and politicians and advertisers and the other professional bores of our period. The artist is interested only in individuals. The statesman who damned the age with the name “the Century of the Common Man” neglected to notice the simple, historical fact that it is the artists, not the statesmen, who decide the character of a period. The Common Man does not exist. He is an abstraction invented by bores for bores. Even you, dear Mrs. Schultz, are an individual. Do not ask yourself, when you read a story, “Is this the behavior common to such and such an age group, income group, psychologically conditioned group?” but, “Why did these particular people behave in this particular way?” Otherwise you are wasting your time in reading works of imagination at all.
A note on Captain Grimes
There is another more intelligent question more often asked: “Are your characters drawn from life?” In the broadest sense, ot course, they are. None except one or two negligible minor figures is a portrait; all the major characters are the result of numberless diverse observations fusing in the imagination into a single whole. My problem has been to distill comedy and sometimes tragedy from the knockabout farce of people’s outward behavior. Men and women as I see them would not be credible if they were literally transcribed; for instance the international journalists whom I met for a few delirious weeks in Addis Ababa, some of whose abandoned acts I tried to introduce into Scoop. Or there is the character Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall. I knew such a man. One of the more absurd escapades of my youth, the result of a debt-settlement conference with my father after which I undertook to make myself financially independent of him, was to take a job as master at a private school. There I met a man who made what has seemed to me the lapidary statement, “This looks like being the first end ol term I’ve seen, old boy, for two years.” But had I written anything like a full account of his iniquities, my publishers and I would have been in the police court.
As for the major characters, I really have very little control over them. I start them off with certain preconceived notions of what they will do and say in certain circumstances but I constantly find them moving another way. For example there was the heroine of Put Out More Flags, a Mrs. Lyne. I had no idea until halfway through the book that she drank secretly. I could not understand why she behaved so oddly. Then when she sat down suddenly on the steps of the cinema I understood all and I had to go back and introduce a series of empty bottles into her flat. I was on board a troopship at the time. There is a young destroyer commander who sat next to me at table who can bear witness of this. He asked me one day at luncheon how my book was going. I said, “Badly. I can’t understand it at all” and then quite suddenly “I know. Mrs. Lyne has been drinking.”
A Handful of Dust, on the other hand, began at the end. I had written a short story about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud. The idea came quite naturally from the experience of visiting a lonely settler of that kind and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner. Then, after the short story was written and published, the idea kept working in my mind. I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them.
People sometimes say to me, “I met someone exacdy like a character out of one of your books.” I meet them everywhere, not by choice but luck. I believe the world is populated by them. Before the war it was sometimes said that i must move in a very peculiar circle. Then I joined the army and served six years, mostly with regular soldiers who are reputed to be uniformly conventional. I found myself under the command and in the mess with one man of startling singularity after another. I have come to the conclusion
that there is no such thing as normality. That is what makes storytelling such an absorbing task, the attempt to reduce to order the anarchic raw materials of life.
That leads to another question: “Are your books meant to be satirical?” No. Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous moral standards—the early Roman Empire and 18th Century Europe. It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. Itexposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own. I foresee in the dark age opening that the scribes may play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories. They were not satirists.
About cliches and snobbery
A final question: “Do you consider Brideshead Revisited your best book?” Yes. A Handful of Dust, my favorite hitherto, dealt entirely with behavior. It was humanist and contained all I had to say about humanism. Brideshead Revisited is vastly more ambitious; perhaps less successful, but I am not deterred either by popular applause or critical blame from being rather proud of the attempt. In particular I am not the least worried about the charge of using cliches. I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners. It comes from keeping second-rate company. Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases. There are many occasions in writing when one needs an unobtrusive background to action, when the landscape must become conventionalized if the foreground is to have the right prominence. I do not believe that a serious writer has ever been shy of an expression because it has been used before. It is the writer of advertisements who is always straining to find bizarre epithets for commonplace objects.
Nor am I worried at the charge of snobbery. Class consciousness, particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mentioning a prostitute 60 years ago. The new prudes say, “No doubt such people do exist but we would sooner not hear about them.” I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.
One criticism does deeply discourage me: a postcard from a man (my sole male correspondent) in Alexandria, Va. He says, “Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything. Seems more like the kiss of Death.” I can only say: I am sorry Mr. McClose, I did my best. I am not quite clear what you mean by the “kiss of Death” but I am sure it is gruesome. Is it something to do with halitosis? If so I have failed indeed and my characters have got wildly out of hand once more.
contra mundum
понедельник, 11 апреля 2011
contra mundum
Thank you for the kind words!
I am concerned about it, too, but I have posted most of what I had in store for years by now and do feel relieved :-) I am not sure I will be able to keep at this rate after maybe another hundred of posts, but now at least everything is neatly organized outside of my head, my desktop and my browser bookmarks.
I also finally did order a lot of old-fashioned paper books, and when they do arrive, which I hope is going to happen soon, we will get something to have the blog running for several other hundreds of posts.
Besides, there are two of us here actually, and there’s always a chance Aloysius Edward might want something to add, too! :-)
P.S. And yes, I did finally figure out how the queue works, so I may try to spread things out.
contra mundum
And so, Oxford in the 1920s became a myth, the symbol of the triumph of homosexuality in England. Alumni -turned writers sought to describe the happiness of their youth; examples include Christopher Isherwood’s Liens and Shadows, Stephen Splender’s World within World and, especially, Evelyn Waugh with Brideshead Revisited the book that most successfully disseminated the mythical image of Oxford as a homosexual paradise. Waugh captures the very essence of Oxford, the romantic passions (between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte). the unrestrained aestheticism and flamboyant homosexuality (Anthony Blanche) and the nostalgia for adolescence (embodied by Aloysius. the teddy bear that Sebastian refuses to leave). Beyond the idyllic picture of a place that a whole generation would struggle to regain, he offers us a life like description of homosexual life in those years. Love comes first and foremost, and the rivalry between the athletes and aesthetes is reported with humor. but homosexual pride in particular is displayed for all to sec with panache, irony and lubricity.
The character of Anthony Blanche, facetious and extravagant, allows Evelyn Waugh to describe with a great flourish the cult of homosexuality that suffused the Roaring Twenties:
At the age of fifteen, lo win a bet, [Anthony Blanche) allowed himself to be dressed as a girl and taken to the big gaming table at the Jockey Club in Buenos Aires; he bad occasion to dine with Proust and Gide, and knew Cocteau and Diaghilev well. Firbank sent him his novels, embellished with enthusiastic dedications; he caused three inextinguishable vendettas in Capri, practiced magic at Ceplialonie; got into thugs and underwent detoxication in California, and was cured of an OEdipal complex in Vienna
This passage touches all the literary and society landmarks of the homosexual world in the inter war period. Homosexuality, for the elite, was more than a sexual proclivity; it was a style, a way of life.
In a scene where he is confronted by the athletes, Anthony Blanche shows his total lack of inhibition, his lack of complexes, and his natural affirmation of his homosexuality — and ends up defeating his adversaries:
- He was approached by a horde of some 20 young people of the worst kind, and what do you think they were chanting? “Anthony, we want Anthony Blanche,” in a kind of litany. Have you ever seen anyone declare himself so. in public?...“My very dear fellows.” I said to them, “you resemble a band of very undisciplined lackeys “Then one of them, a rather pretty bit, honestly, accused me of sins against nature. “My dear,” I said to him, “it may lie that I am an invert, but 1 am not insatiable, even so. Come back and see me some day when you are alone.”
The character of Anthony Blanche embodies the cult of homosexuality; confronted by a hostile or disconcerted society, the “invert” no longer bides his true nature. Once more, the contrast with the neighboring countries is great. In France, for example, there was no establishment that could entertain the myth that homosexuality was intellectually superior, the way Oxford and Cambridge did. Of course, there are some personal accounts reporting on homosexual experiences in the universities, but they are individual cases which one cannot equate with a widespread social phenomenon. Daniel Guerin describes drinking with a good looking neighbor who was a fellow student at the Saint Cyr Military Academy and the rough housing, pillow fights and wrestling that verged on more, and the arousal that resulted.
contra mundum
Previous post is #400. I did not expect to last so long, or to find so much information in so little time so yes, I do feel proud. And I re-opened the Ask box for whatever requests or comments you might have.
Thank you all for following, liking and rebloging.
contra mundum
ACTOR Jeremy Irons is out to rid himself of the persona of Charles Ryder, the character he played in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which returned to Channel Four recently.
Irons (once the debonair hero of such dramas as Love For Lydia), makes this clear as he talks about his reasons for taking on the totally different role of the Polish foreman-Nowak in Jerzy Skolimowski’s film Moonlighting, which Channel Four also screened, last month.
‘It was done to break the mould,’ he says, ‘the Charles Ryder mould.’
Cetainly, Nowak, as played by Irons, was a mould-breaker, a Pole whom Irons created by drawing on his knowledge of Irishmen.
‘There are very strong parallels between Poland and Ireland,’ Irons says. ‘Their people both have inferiority feelings about their own worth. Both are very poor. Both have a history of being overrun. Both are the butts of international humour.’
Alt of which is not to say that in breaking the Charles Ryder mould. Irons is dismissive of the role or the series.
Jeremy Irons himself is sitting in his personal caravan outside Zap Studios in Sydney, Australia, wearing a black T-shirt, cords and sandals, drinking Australian lager from a can and casting his mind back to the role which brought him to the forefront of the modern school of English actors.
‘Charles Ryder.’ he explains, ‘is the one through whose eyes you see the story of Brideshead. What I felt I had to do was to be the eyes for the audience.
‘In any case, it is not an actor’s job to make himself shine — it’s an actor’s job to fulfil his role.’
What comes through as he speaks is not facile enthusiasm but analytical dedication. Jeremy Irons, Gent. Hot Property, keeping his cool, betraying no haste short of covering a lot of ground. And there’s a deal of ground to cover.
Public school, busking. Godspell, Wild Oats (in which his wife-to-be Sinead Cusack told him — as she was coming off-stage and he was going on — that she was pregnant), marriage, Brideshead Revisited, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fame, Fortune and All That Jazz, Betrayal, The Captain’s Doll.
And now he faces possibly his most challenging test of all, the 2.2-million-dollar Australian feature film version of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.
He co-stars with Liv Ullmann, at 44 a renowned interpreter of Ibsen’s work.
Director is Henri Safran: Paris-born, London-trained, Sydney-based.
Irons’ producer is Phillip Emanuel, sometime boy actor in Coronation Street, founder of The Pool Theatre, Edinburgh, and now resident in Sydney.
In the film. Jeremy Irons plays Harold Ackland. With his wife. Gina (Liv Ullmann). Harold runs a photographic business in a small industrial town.
Harold and Gina and their 13-year-old daughter Henriet-te (Lucinda Jones) lead a quite happy life, despite the fact that they are poor and Henriette is losing her sight.
An old friend of Harold’s, Gregory Wardle (Arthur Dig-nem), shatters their contentment by revealing to Harold that Henriette is not really his daughter. She is the love-child of Wardle’s father. George (Michael Tate), whose housekeeper Gina once was.
Asked why he had decided to do the film Irons savs: ‘Great scripts are not easy to find. There is a lot of lavatory paper about.”
Producer Emanuel is in no doubt about Irons’ performance. ‘Magic,” he says, clearly hoping that the magic will also turn the tears and the laughter into hefty box-office takings.
Liv Ullmann defines the essence of the Irons appeal. ‘He brings with him a secret. I think that is always interesting,” she says. ‘Great actors always give the sense of having a secret.’
In part, the Jeremy Irons secret is technique. ‘You have to flirt with the camera.” he explains. ‘Make love to it. Make it laugh. I used to watch myself turning my head away from the camera, until I learned better. I use the camera as a window through which I pass to the people’
In part, his secret is in his attitude. ‘I am a romantic. I prefer to see life as something beautiful. There is an awful lot of happiness in the world. It needs no exaggeration.”
After he completes The Wild Duck. Irons is bound for Paris and the feature film Swann in Love, based on part of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past.
Again, characteristic of Irons’ approach, he is proposing to play the part of Swann in French and is listening to tapes to perfect his accent.
‘If Robert de Niro can put on weight to play a 15-stone boxer, as he did in Raging Bull, I can put on French to play a Frenchman.’ he says.
Irons docs not attempt to hide his hope that this feature film version of part of Proust’s classic would lead to a tele-vsion series based on the complete work.
After Swann in Love he is to play the role of Biggies — nostalgia hero for an actor whose appeal is at least three parts nostalgia.
On the way back to his hotel, I asked Irons how he resisted the temptation to do everything that was offered while he was so much in demand.
‘That would be the quickest way to shorten a career.’ he replies. ‘I’m pacing myself. I am only half-way there. I mean to work till I’m 70.’