Strawberry leaves forever

[Brideshead]

A British marquess is entitled to a coronet bearing four strawberry leaves (three visible) and four silver balls (or pearls) around the rim (two visible). The actual coronet is worn mostly on certain ceremonial occasions, but a marquis can bear his coronet of rank on his coat of arms above the shield.

In the village the working party who had been preparing the decorations for the bridal entry began unpicking the B’s on the bunting and substituting M’s, obliterating the Earl’s points and stencilling balls and strawberry leaves on the painted coronets, in preparation for Lord Marchmain’s return.

Cliffe notes:

These are references to the coronets worn by peers of the United Kingdom on formal state occasions. Earls (such as Bridey) wore coronets which had rims decorated with balls on tall points (or stalks, as they are known), and marquesses (e.g. Lord Marchmain) had coronets with four strawberry leaves alternating with four silver balls. (Dukes’ coronets are distinguished by having only strawberry leaves.) The bunting hung up to celebrate Bridey’s wedding is now being used for Lord Marchmain’s welcome.

@темы: motifs, aristocracy

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Lady Dorothy Heber Percy

[Brideshead]

12:00AM GMT 17 Nov 2001

LADY Dorothy Heber Percy, known to her friends as “Coote”, who has died aged 89, was the youngest and cosiest of the Lygon sisters.

She was born Lady Dorothy Lygon on February 22 1912, the fourth daughter of the 7th Earl Beauchamp, KG, who, after acts unpardonable, was obliged to leave the country and settled on the Continent.

The story goes that Lady Beauchamp received a visit from her brother, the Duke of Westminster, who explained the reason for this precipitate departure, the full horror of which she did not entirely digest. “Bend’Or tells me that Beauchamp is a bugler,” she said.

While Lord Beauchamp was still at Madresfield, the family seat near Malvern, his daughters used to urge the male house guests to lock their doors at night against the nocturnal prowlings of their father. One morning the peer told his third daughter, Mary: “He’s a nice young man, your friend, but he’s damned uncivil.”

Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited clearly owed much inspiration to the Lygon family, though in conversation with Lady Dorothy, Waugh went to some pains to claim that they were only partly the inspiration and that all the ages and details were different.

Nevertheless, Lord Beauchamp was, in certain respects, the model for Waugh’s Lord Marchmain, living in exile in Venice with his mistress, and Madresfield was the inspiration for Brideshead. Lady Dorothy claimed that the only connection between Brideshead and Madresfield was the art nouveau chapel, while Waugh’s biographer Christopher Sykes saw some parallels with the much grander Castle Howard, which was used in the Granada television film.

“Coote”, or “Pollen” or even “Poll” as she was called, was an early friend of Evelyn Waugh and, according to Waugh’s wife Laura, “the nicest of all your friends”. It is tempting to suggest that she might have been, in part, the inspiration for Lady Cordelia Flyte, the precocious, but devoutly Roman Catholic younger sister in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh had met her brothers at Oxford, and was soon a frequent visitor to Madresfield.

After Lord Beauchamp left England in 1931, the family was divided, Lady Beauchamp departing with one son, while Coote’s eldest brother, Lord Elmley, and Hugh Lygon (the more wayward brother to whom Waugh’s character Lord Sebastian Flyte owed much) took over the house with the three unmarried sisters, Sibell, Mary (“Maimie”) and Dorothy. Of these sisters, the elder two were beauties, particularly the blonde Maimie, while Coote had, in the words of Selina Hastings, another of Waugh’s biographers, “a large, plain face and wore spectacles”, a look she carried into grown-up life.

Evelyn Waugh was a welcome diversion in the household. He would often be writing while staying with them, though the sisters frequently dragged him from his desk to partake in some amusement. Despite this, he dedicated Black Mischief jointly to Mary and Dorothy in 1932. Waugh once ran across Coote’s childish diary and could not resist adding pornographic passages about participation in orgies to the young girl’s sсript, and he appended to her innocent drawing of a cart horse a giant penis. “It was like having Puck as a member of the household,” she recalled later.

In the Second World War, Coote served as a Flight Officer in the WAAF, and was posted to Italy working on photographic interpretation. After the war she took up farming in Gloucestershire. In the 1950s, she worked as social secretary at the British Embassy in Athens, and in 1956 spent six months in Istanbul, working as a governess, before going to live on the Greek island of Hydra. She returned to England in the 1960s and for many years worked as an archivist at Christie’s.

She settled near Faringdon, the eccentric Oxfordshire home of Lord Berners, the inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s “Lord Merlin”. Berners dyed his doves a variety of colours and summoned guests to dinner with a music box. Penelope Betjeman once rode her horse into the drawing room for tea.

Coote - who all this time had remained a spinster - knew Lord Berners well and was a witness to his tempestuous relationship with Robert Heber Percy, the young man, nicknamed “Mad Boy”, who lived there with him. Berners died in 1950, and Heber Percy inherited the estate, which he ran with supreme efficiency, maintaining the Berners eccentricities, and adding follies of his own, most notably two enormous griffins that presided over a swimming pool.

A wild and pugnacious character, Robert Heber Percy also enjoyed running an undertakers’ business, and relished their annual conferences, which invariably provided him with a fund of good stories. He had married Jennifer Fry for a time and produced a beautiful daughter, Victoria. But more usually his stable-mate was Hugh Cruddas (“The Captain”), though eventually they fell out.

Evelyn Waugh wrote to Diana Mosley: “The Mad Boy has installed a Mad Boy of his own. Has there ever been a property in history that has devolved from catamite to catamite for any length of time?” Coote and her sister Maimie were regular visitors over the years. While Coote remained alert, brisk, and full of stories, Maimie, her beauty faded and her spirit dimmed by drink, would sit gazing mute into space, stroking her little dog.

As the years passed, and Robert Heber Percy became frailer, though no less volatile, Coote unwisely accepted a proposal of marriage from him, and, excited as any young bride, became the mistress of Faringdon in 1985. This caused a good deal of disruption in the domestic arrangements; the faithful Rosa, Heber Percy’s cook, departing in high dudgeon, and there was antipathy from some of Heber Percy’s regular lady guests who had come to treat Faringdon as their own patch. But this phase was of short duration and Coote soon retreated to a nearby bungalow, where she was much happier. Robert Heber Percy died in 1987, leaving Faringdon to his daughter.

Lately, Lady Dorothy assisted John Byrne in a stylish re-issue of Lord Berners’s most elusive book, The Girls of Radcliff Hall (by the Cygnet Press in 2000), a mischievous fictional evocation of life at Faringdon, in which all the boys (including Heber Percy) become girls at a boarding school, with Lord Berners as the headmistress.

@темы: brideshead, bridey, flytes, i am not i, lord marchmian, cordelia

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Diana Quick captured so many hearts as Lady Julia that a Sunday...

[Brideshead]

Diana Quick captured so many hearts as Lady Julia that a Sunday magazine was moved to put her on their cover with the caption, “Is this the most beautiful woman in the world?”

@темы: mini-series, julia

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Read the novel; don’t see the film, by Eric Hester

[Brideshead]

Read the novel; don’t see the film, by Eric Hester:

As well as being a Catholic headmaster for twenty-four years, Eric Hester was also a chief examiner in English Literature. This article is as lightly altered version of one published in a Catholic periodical a few years ago. Eric Hester writes that the new film version of Brideshead Revisited has not yet been released in England but he is disturbed by that he has read of it: “The film version seems to have abandoned the main theme of the book, “the operation of divine grace.” At the end of the novel the central character has clearly become a Catholic and the novel ends optimistically. The film, apparently, has Ryder rejecting the Catholic faith. In the novel, the relationship between Charles Ryder and Sebastian is not a homosexual one but one of an intense friendship between two young men, not uncommon in those times in England and not unheard of even today; the film makes the relationship an explicitly homosexual one. I urge people not to see the new film but to read the book, which is arguably the greatest Catholic novel in English.

@темы: 2008, films, links, bubbles, religion

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After Brideshead, Grace spent a number of years working in...

[Brideshead]

After Brideshead, Grace spent a number of years working in operetta, playing Koko in The Mikado and Joseph Porter in HMS Pinafore. In 1992, he appeared in Princess Ida for the ENO, and last year shared the stage with Elaine Paige in The Drowsy Chaperone in its West End run. He’s also a prolific television character-actor, notably playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin of Sherwood and appearing in comedies such as My Family and Birds of a Feather.

@темы: mini-series, anthony blanche

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JUNE 21.—ST. ALOYSIUS GONZAGA.

[Brideshead]

SAINT ALOYSIUS, the eldest son of Ferdinand Gonzaga, Marquis of Castiglione, was born on the 9th of March, 1568. The first words he pronounced were the holy names of Jesus and Mary. When he was nine years of age he made a vow of perpetual virginity, and by a special grace was ever exempted from temptations against purity. He received his first communion at the hands of St. Charles Borromeo. At an early age he resolved to leave the world, and in a vision was directed by our Blessed Lady to join the Society of Jesus. The Saint’s mother rejoiced on learning his determination to become a religious, but his father for three years refused his consent. At length St. Aloysius obtained permission to enter the novitiate on the 25th of November, 1585. He took his vows after two years, and went through the ordinary course of philosophy and theology. He was wont to say he doubted whether without penance grace would continue to make head against nature, which, when not afflicted and chastised, tends gradually to relapse into its old state, losing the habit of suffering acquired by the labor of years. ” I am a crooked piece of iron,” he said, ” and am come into religion to be made straight by the hammer of mortification and penance.” During his last year of theology a malignant fever broke out in Rome; the Saint offered himself for the service of the sick, and he was accepted for the dangerous duty. Several of the brothers caught the fever, and Aloysius was of the number. He was brought to the point of death, but recovered, only to fall, however, into slow fever, which carried him off after three months. He died, repeating the Holy Name, a little after midnight between the 20th and 21st of June on the octave-day of Corpus Christi, being rather more than twenty-three years of age.

@темы: aloysius, religion

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Charles Sturridge (director) married Phoebe Nicholls...

[Brideshead]

Charles Sturridge (director) married Phoebe Nicholls (Cordelia Flyte) in 1985.

@темы: mini-series, films

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Brideshead Revisited Revisited

[Brideshead]

Brideshead Revisited Revisited:

A Brideshead Revisited blog on WordPress. Unfortunately, it was abandoned in November 2008 with less than 100 entries.

@темы: links

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xxbluejay: The Oxford Library

[Brideshead]

xxbluejay:

The Oxford Library

@темы: oxford

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Waugh's World - A Guide to the Novel of Evelyn Waugh, by Iain Gale

[Brideshead]

Waugh's World - A Guide to the Novel of Evelyn Waugh, by Iain Gale:

All I know about this book is that it has a n alphabetic list of EW’s characters with descriptions and some analysis.

@темы: books

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Hooper appeared; he was a sallow youth with hair combed back, without parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent; he had been in the company two months.

[Brideshead]

EW does not particularise it, but it is an accent from the central counties of England. Hooper could, for example, come from Birmingham, the second city of England.

(Cliffe)

Midlands

• As in the North, Midlands accents generally do not use a broad A, so that cast is pronounced [kast] rather than the [k
  
  

@темы: English language, motifs, army

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Born at Erice, near Trapani, Sicily, probably in 1443, Bl....

[Brideshead]

Born at Erice, near Trapani, Sicily, probably in 1443, Bl. Aloysius Rabat

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

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Brideshead Revisited: 2nd Edition

[Brideshead]

Brideshead Revisited: 2nd Edition:

It is some Chinese site, and you cannot view the whole text at once as a txt file.

The first edition can be found on-line here.

@темы: books, links

---

Boy Mulcaster

[Brideshead]

Boy Mulcaster’s role in the novel is often underrated. I see him as a force of circumstances which drives Charles to his destination: faith. Just look at the most obvious points:

• it was Boy who took them to Old Hundreth and it was boy who insisted on taking a car - which led to Sebastian’s disaster;


• it was Boy who convinced Charles to be “good chaps like the dead chaps” - which led to Julia learning about Charles being in England, and Charles going to Fez;


• it was Boy’s sister Charles married and it was Boy who arranged the divorce.

There are subtler issues, like Boy’s part in the story of Anthony Blanche’s warning against charm. Charles becomes less convinced with what Antoin told him the night before when Sebastian breaks his spell – and then:

“Did he? How silly. Aloysius wouldn’t approve of that at all, would you, you pompous old bear?”

Exactly as Antoin told Charles. Chapter I.2 ends here in the first edition, but the second edition has one additional sentence:

And then Boy Mulcaster came into the room.

@темы: let me explain them to you, boy mulcaster

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"In December 1927 Waugh and Evelyn Gardner became engaged, despite the opposition of Lady Burghclere..."

[Brideshead]

“In December 1927 Waugh and Evelyn Gardner became engaged, despite the opposition of Lady Burghclere who felt that Waugh lacked moral fibre and kept unsuitable company. Among their friends they quickly became known as “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn”.”

- Wikipedia (via fivefootshelf)

@темы: waugh

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taffeta-phrases: View of High Street, Oxford from St. Mary’s...

[Brideshead]

taffeta-phrases:

View of High Street, Oxford from St. Mary’s Tower. Spring 2007.

@темы: oxford

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“Peculiar Splendor”: The Aesthetic of Suffering in Brideshead Revisited.

[Brideshead]

“To Sebastian he said: ‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pincushion,’…” Anthony Blanche

Brideshead Revisited is not so much a novel of protracted nostalgia as it is one of hagiography. The character of Sebastian Flyte often assumes the revered aura and significance of a saint in the course of Charles Ryder’s remembrances. Anthony Blanche aptly characterizes this idolization by comparing Sebastian to his namesake, Saint Sebastian. He can be stuck “full of barbed arrows”, because he is a martyr and a testament to the lost cause of the English aristocratic lifestyle. But Blanche’s analogy works on several levels, and a comparison between the life and representation of Saint and dipsomaniac undergraduate is profitable in examining Brideshead Revisited’s spiritual, moral, and sexual implications.

Saint Sebastian’s life, as given in William Caxton’s first English edition of the Archbishop of Genoa’s lives of the saints, was quite a tumultuous one. After completing a number of Christian acts and miracles in secret, he revealed himself as a Christian to the Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian promptly ordered that Sebastian be executed at the hands of the archers he had once commanded in the armies of Rome. The image of Sebastian bound to a tree or pillar and pierced with arrows, is the most common representation of his fate in Renaissance iconography*. Perhaps because of the visceral drama of the scene, Saint Sebastian was one of the most frequently used subjects for such paintings and frescos.

The iconography of Saint Sebastian is unique for several reasons. First, because the “suffering” saint sometimes does not appear to be suffering at all, and second, because his appearance is often quite emasculated and eroticized. D

@темы: ian, st sebastian, motifs,sebast, religion

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From A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, volume I & II, by Florence Tamagne

[Brideshead]

…Others, however, sought a departure from the ubiquitous classicism. Suits in electric blue, almond green or old rose were much admired, but few dared to wear them for fear of being kicked out of public places. Certain accessories became homosexual signs of recognition, in particular suede shoes and camel’s hair coats. Some dared to wear their hair long.

Any eccentricity was readily perceived as proof of inversion, leading to a little adventure for Quentin Crisp, а Над rant homosexual it ever there was one, when he presented himself at the draft board: While his eyes were being tested, they said to him, “You’ve dyed your hair. That’s a sign of sexual perversion. Do you know what these words mean?” He just said yes, and that he was a homosexual’.

Thai does not mean that the man in the street could clearly identify a homosexual, that lie knew enough to decipher the signs. I low ever, any sartorial oddity was suspicious and could easily be seen as a sign of homosexuality. There was one way out: to be perceived as an artist, i.e. necessarily an “original.” Crisp notes that the sexual significance of certain forms of comportment was understood only vaguely, but the sartorial symbolism was recognized by everyone. Wearing suede shoes inevitably made you suspect. Anyone whose hair was a little raggedy at the nape of the neck was regarded as an artist, a for­eigner, or worse yet One of his friends mid him that, when someone introduced him to an older gentleman as an artist, the man said: “Oh. I know this young man is an artist The other day I saw him on the street in a brown jacket.”

In the same way, the use of makeup was spreading, so that mere possession of a powder puff was enough to prove one’s homosexuality for the police. Evelyn Waugh remembers sleazy young men in shirtsleeves standing in a liar, repairing the devastations caused by grenadine and creme de cacao with powder and lipstick. This practice was still tainted with infamy and it generally was indulged in secrecy, sheerly for the titillation:

Sometimes I arranged to meet my friend George at the station. We would hoard in first class, for there was no conductor at that hour of the night and the compartments were private with a mirror on the wall. George was mad about makeup and initiated me. It was just brown powder bought from a theater shop on Leicester Square. Once applied, we would ask each other if it were visible. “Yes” meant that a layer had better be quickly removed. “No” meant the addition of a little more powder; and so on to Liverpool Street. Once in the subway and until the end of the line, we would sit in the corner very withdrawn, terrified at the thought of being seen and per haps sent to prison.

The very chic Stephen Tennant, taking tea with his aunt, was admonished: “Stephen, darling, go and wash your face.” Thus we know that the practice was by no means limited to male prostitutes, but involved various social classes. I low ever, it was far from being well accepted, even in the most exalted circles. At a ball hosted by the Earl of Pembroke, Cecil Beaton was thrown in the water by some of the more virile young men; one of them shouted: “Do you think the fag drowned?” According to Tennant, who was there at the time, the attack was caused by the abuse of make up; he was convinced that it was Beaton’s made up face that so disturbed the thugs. In the 1920s, Stephen Tennant embodied homosexual aesthetics carried to its apogee. He was a great beauty, and he enjoyed using all the artifices of seduction and l’art de la pose, theatricality. In that, he exaggerated the prevailing fashion for dressing up. Vogue, in its spring 1920 edition, wrote that there was nothing more amusing than to dress up and paint one’s face outrageously for, “as Tallulah Bankhead says, there is no such thing as too much lipstick”. Photographed by Cecil Beaton, especially, Tennant looked like a prince charming. Even in his everyday wear, he stood apart from the crowd; his biographer Philip Hoare made much of his style, and his innate sense of theater which made him a symbol of the Bright Young People of the 1920s in London. Late in the decade, Tennant represented the most extreme of fashion for a man, at least. His feminine manners and appearance were not diminished by the striped double breasted suits he wore, in good taste and well cut, “which ought to have made him resemble any young fellow downtown.” But Stephen’s physical presence was enough to belie such an impression. He was large and imperious, but he moved with a pronounced step, affected, which was described as “prancing” or as “seeming to lx- attached at the knees.” Each of his movements, from the facial muscles to his long limbs, seemed calculated for effect. He gilded his fair hair with a sprinkling of gold dust, and used certain preparations to hold the dark roots in check. “Stephen could very well have been taken for a Vogue illustration perhaps by Lepappe brought to life.

The most famous Bright Young People had made their studies in Oxford, like-Harold Acton and Brian Howard. Acton was the first to wear very broad trousers (Oxford bags) in lavender. Together with Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant and other young society men they organized all kinds of themed evenings. Stephen Tennant’s effeminate appearance caused ambivalent reactions. Some were simply struck: “I do not know if that is a man or a woman, but it is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen,” the admiral Sir Lewis Clinton Baker would say. Others were less indulgent. When Tennant arrived one evening dressed particularly outrageously, the criticism reached a boiling point. Rex Whistler, one of his friends, considered it regrettable that he had gone too far: “He posed as much as a girl.” Rex’s brother added, Men should not draw attention to themselves. That was the only true charge against Stephen, and it was irrefutable.” Parents also com­plained that their children spent time with Stephen. Edith Olivier noted that Helena Folkestone was complaining about how badly people spoke of Stephen, that he was hated by people who did not understand him. Olivier noted that they were out of touch with the times, since “nowadays so many boys resemble girls without being effeminate. That is the kind of boys that have grown up since the war.”

The main trends which we have just reviewed for men are also found among women.

@темы: fashion, waugh, i am not i, fairies

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Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - Sebastian (by tibi928)

[Brideshead]

Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - Sebastian (by tibi928)

@темы: i like getting drunk at luncheons, senastian

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"Therefore, up unlil the conclusion of the Second World War access to the collegiate universities..."

[Brideshead]

“Therefore, up unlil the conclusion of the Second World War access to the collegiate universities followed two quite separate channels: one for the commoners and one for the scholars. While each channel may have favoured certain social groups, and most certainly worked against the interests of other social groups, it could be argued that - excepting scholars - the admissions criteria were relatively undemanding and essentially inclusive. The colleges needed undergraduates who could afford to pay the fees and who would fit in. and beyond that they had no demanding criteria. This was a loosely policed, self-regulated world in which much was done through established social networks. While the academically talented were in demand there was no one model of the ideal college man. Although the great colleges would always attract the most academically desirable undergraduates, they at least recognised that the poorer colleges should be able to tap into the pool of talent. But it is difficult to imagine a Sebastian Flyte expecting to be an undergraduate of any college other than ‘the House’.”

- Oxford and the decline of the collegiate tradition
by Ted Tapper, David Palfreyman

@темы: sebastian, oxford