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вторник, 19 апреля 2011
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“Drink wine, and you will sleep well. Sleep, and you will not sin. Avoid sin, and you will be saved. Ergo, drink wine and be saved. - Medieval German saying”
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(via marviny)
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The War and Brideshead Revisited: “I Do Not Want Any More Experiences”
[…]
Wine is the symbol and sacrament of the world’s good things, of which Rex Mottram is ignorant and of which Ryder is unfairly deprived by the war. Even Waugh later had reservations about Brides-bead’s epicurean lust, writing to Graham Greene, for example, in 1950: “Talking of re-reading, I re-read Brideshead and was appalled. I can find many excuses—that it was the product Consule Bracken of spam, Nissen huts, black-out—but it wont do for peacetime.” And later he told an interviewer:
It is very much a child of its time. Had it not been written when it was, at a very bad time in the war when there was nothing to eat, it would have been a different book. The fact that it is rich in evocative description—in gluttonous writing—is a direct result of the privations and austerity of the times.
The diaries give a slightly less harrowing impression of Waugh’s privations; certainly as he wrote Bridesbead he was seldom without wine, once having some of his private stock of claret fetched from Piers Court; noting later, during Lent, that he “drank a great deal of good wine which is getting scarcer daily but still procurable by those who take the trouble”; treating his old Oxford friends John Sutro and Harold Acton to “a fine dinner—gulls’ eggs, consomme, partridge, haddock on toast, Perrier Jouet ‘28, nearly a bottle a head, liqueur brandy, Partaga cigars—an unusual feast for these times”; another time drinking “champagne at
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Women play a peculiar and interesting role in the works of Mr Waugh. His male figures are not notably successful in their relations with the opposite sex - there are many love affairs and many married couples, but never a successful love affair leading to a stable marriage. His most successful women, artistically, are those who, for good or evil, carry the principle of their vitality uninvaded within themselves - Margot Metroland, Brenda Last, Julia Stitch, Barbara Sothill. Angela Lyne is a mask, Aimee Thanatogenos a symbol, Virginia Crouchback a tart — all highly desirable qualifications for a successful and sharp delineation. Celia Ryder, the sister of Boy Mulcaster, is one of these. ’ “I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,” said Charles. “I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.”’ So it was, artistically, since Ryder’s dislike is the key to the author’s success in depicting her, one of the long line of vapid and predatory females descending from Brenda Last and Lucy Sim-monds. Women who are being fulfilled in their biological functions receive short shrift from Mr Waugh: Celia Ryder sea-sick is Lucy Simmonds in child-birth. ‘I brought her the flowers from the sitting-room; they completed the atmosphere of a maternity ward which she had managed to create in the cabin.’ … ’ “Mrs Clark is being so sweet”; she was always quick to get the servants’ names.’
The world of Mr Waugh’s novels is essentially a male world; women gain admittance through being boyish, gamine and intelligent, or feminine, disreputable and disliked. The romantic heroine, compelling the ideal love of the male, the ‘She’ of the popular novelist and the psychologists, is mercifully absent. Only in the figure of Julia has she almost gained admittance, a figure from the vasty deeps of the unconscious without benefit of critical reason or humour, without the release of tension which comes from the occasional side-step into the world of whimsy, with hardly a touch of the eccentric oddity required by Charles’s aesthetic mentor Blanche. It is not her charm alone which is the source of her weakness. The treatment of Julia in the first books, with the story of her debutante year, her thoughts of marriage, and her delightful fantasy ‘of the kind of man who would do’, is still, in spite of the fairy story touch, wholly suitable. It is not, entirely, that she is a Marchmain — one of the family against which Anthony uttered his comprehensive warning. Sebastian is charming, and not a little odd, and his oddity increases and becomes more poignant when he is relegated to the wings and the safe aesthetic distance of Anthony’s account of the present and Cordelia’s fantasy of the future. He is, if not morally blameless, at least ‘right’ by Brideshead’s mad certainty of decision. Lady Marchmain is both charming and odd, saintly and yet a femme fatale - ’ “they never escape once she’s had her teeth in them”,’ reports Anthony Blanche; the discrepancy between neurosis and piety is ours to welcome, not to reconcile or explain. Charming and odd, charming and infuriating, charming and beastly, charming and disgraceful, all these combinations could plausibly be saved from Blanche’s condemnation - but not just ’ “creamy English charm, playing tigers”.’
The moment of Charles’s captivation to Julia’s creamy charm comes quite early. It comes with the fantasy of Julia as a ‘heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her finger-tips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster’ - Rex Mottram. Now it was not unusual in Mr Waugh’s earlier works for the heroine - if such a term is appropriate — to throw in her lot with the successful, coarse, extravert male; Margot Beste-Chetwynde marries Lord Metroland and Nina goes off with Ginger. But there is very good reason why the hero should relinquish her and return to his College or to his loneliness; we are not concerned with the inner history of the female psyche after its association with the shallow man of affairs. Here, however, the heroine of the fairy story, when Charles meets her after ten years on the liner from New York, has, through contact with the world of Rex Mottram, become waif-like, her beauty has acquired an added air of sadness, ‘this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart’.
To Charles’ heart, in fact. Or to the author’s heart? We have here the difficulty, common in first-person narratives, of assessing whether the author is writing in person or in character. The critics had no doubt that the dinner in Paris where Charles, lost in the magical world of Marchmain, indulges himself at Rex’s expense in a meal which might have been taken out of a restaurant brochure, was Mr Waugh speaking in person, as an epicure, and said so caustically. There is certainly a streak of maudlin sentimentality about Charles, brought out and emphasized as, with the progress of their affair, Julia again recedes into a mysterious distance, and becomes, in her tight little gold tunic and evening gown, ever less tangible as an inhabitant of a real world. The peak of their inner estrangement, barely concealed by the accepted habit of past possession, and the summit of tension between the two, is the brutal reminder which Brides-head delivers of her irregular status, her passionate revolt against the very presence of her lover, and their momentary reconciliation. The lush passages increase and are spun out beyond the requirements of a disciplined style: ‘I saw her to bed; the blue lids fell over her eyes; her pale lips moved on the pillow; but whether to wish me good-night or to murmur a prayer — a jingle of the nursery that came to her now in the twilight world between sorrow and sleep: some ancient pious rhyme that had come down to Nanny Hawkins from centuries of bedtime whispering, through all the changes of language, from the days of pack-horses on the Pilgrim’s Way - I did not know.’ We are back in the world of Chesterton, but without his philosophical stringency. A way into the Church for Charles, this Tudor romanticism of pack horses on the Pilgrim’s Way? Perhaps, but not the way of many others, and only one part of that of Mr Waugh. A quotation from Mr Waugh’s review of Mr Greene’s The Unquiet American comes appositely to hand: ‘Fowler is base. So base that it is a disagreeable experience to be forced into intimacy with him, to have to hear the story from his lips and see it through his eyes.’ Substitute ‘Ryder is sentimental’ for ‘Fowler is base’, and the parallel, for passages such as this one, is exact. The review continues: ‘This can hardly be called an artistic fault, for it is part of the artist’s plain intention, but I think it is a lapse in taste.’ Mr Waugh’s artistic intention is, regrettably, not so plain.
It is not surprising that the passage considered above is followed by two full pages of the political-conversation pastiche which we have learnt to expect whenever Rex and his associates are introduced. Effective, this contrast of two worlds, but technically just out of focus, just emancipating itself from artistic tact. 1 “I wonder which is the more horrible,”’ says Charles to Julia,’ “Celia’s Art and Fashion or Rex’s Politics and Money.”’ Artistically, there is no doubt; Celia is perfectly delineated, but Rex suffers by too obvious contrast with the creamy charm of Sebastian and Julia. Well sketched in the early stages, Rex handling troublesome policemen, giving Julia a tortoise studded with diamonds, Rex swallowing religious instruction like a double brandy, is excellent. But the jangling and brash conversation of his political set, though effective, gives rise by reaction to Charles’s dinner at Maillard’s - ‘soup of oseilk, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a caneton a la presse, a lemon souffle’ - and the haunting, magical charm of Julia’s later moods. Julia’s hysterical outburst against her burden of sin -’ “no way back; the gates barred; all the saints and angels posted along the walls” ’ - is magnificent. But Charles’s own sentimental reaction surely justifies Anthony’s warning not to fall a victim to the Marchmains and their charm.
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The Happy People - The Boy Mulcaster Song:
We are The Happy People. We are from Stockholm and play pop music. We play it with our guitars and our moog and what have you… Sometimes we play it in front of people and sometimes we record it. When we don’t we just sit in our slippers drinking coffee or tea, hoping that those hearing our songs will think we’re as good as we think ourselves…
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I
There was a scent of dust in the air; a thin vestige surviving in the twilight from the golden clouds with which before chapel the House Room fags had filled the evening sunshine. Light was failing. Beyond the trefoils and branched mullions of the windows the towering autumnal leaf was now flat and colourless. All the eastward slope of Spierpoint Down, where the College buildings stood, lay lost in shadow; above and behind, on the high lines of Chanctonbury and Spierpoint Ring, the first day of term was gently dying.
In the House Room thirty heads were bent over their books. Few form-masters had set any preparation that day. The Classical Upper Fifth, Charles Ryder’s new form, were “revising last term’s work” and Charles was writing his diary under cover of Hassall’s History. He looked up from the page to the darkling texts which ran in Gothic sсript around the frieze. “Qui diligit Deum diligit et fratrem suum.”
“Get on with your work, Ryder,” said Apthorpe.
Apthorpe has greased into being a house-captain this term, Charles wrote. This is his first Evening School. He is being thoroughly officious and on his dignity.
“Can we have the light on, please?”
“All right. Wykham-Blake, put it on.” A small boy rose from the under-school table. “Wykham-Blake, I said. There’s no need for everyone to move.”
A rattle of the chain, a hiss of gas, a brilliant white light over half the room. The other light hung over the new boys’ table.
“Put the light on, one of you, whatever your names are.”
Six startled little boys looked at Apthorpe and at one another, all began to rise together, all sat down, all looked at Apthorpe in consternation.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
Apthorpe leaned over their heads and pulled the chain; there was a hiss of gas but no light. “The bye-pass is out. Light it, you.” He threw a box of matches to one of the new boys who dropped it, picked it up, climbed on the table and looked miserably at the white glass shade, the three hissing mantles and at Apthorpe. He had never seen a lamp of this kind before; at home and at his private school there was electricity. He lit a match and poked at the lamp, at first without effect; then there was a loud explosion; he stepped back, stumbled and nearly lost his footing among the books and ink-pots, blushed hotly and regained the bench. The matches remained in his hand and he stared at them, lost in an agony of indecision. How should he dispose of them? No head was raised but everyone in the House Room exulted in the drama. From the other side of the room Apthorpe held out his hand invitingly.
“When you have quite finished with my matches perhaps you’ll be so kind as to give them back.”
In despair the new boy threw them towards the house-captain; in despair he threw slightly wide. Apthorpe made no attempt to catch them, but watched them curiously as they fell to the floor. “How very extraordinary,” he said. The new boy looked at the matchbox; Apthorpe looked at the new boy. “Would it be troubling you too much if I asked you to give me my matches?” he said.
The new boy rose to his feet, walked the few steps, picked up the matchbox and gave it to the house-captain, with the ghastly semblance of a smile.
“Extraordinary crew of new men we have this term,” said Apthorpe. “They seem to be entirely half-witted. Has anyone been turned on to look after this man?”
“Please, I have,” said Wykham-Blake.
“A grave responsibility for one so young. Try and convey to his limited intelligence that it may prove a painful practice here to throw matchboxes about in Evening School, and laugh at house officials. By the way, is that a workbook you’re reading?”
“Oh, yes, Apthorpe.” Wykham-Blake raised a face of cherubic innocence and presented the back of the Golden Treasury.
“Who’s it for?”
“Mr. Graves. We’re to learn any poem we like.”
“And what have you chosen?”
“Milton-on-his-blindness.”
“How, may one ask, did that take your fancy?”
“I learned it once before,” said Wykham-Blake and Apthorpe laughed indulgently.
“Young blighter,” he said.
Charles wrote: Now he is snooping round seeing what books men are reading. It would be typical if he got someone beaten his first Evening School. The day before yesterday this time I was in my dinner-jacket just setting out for dinner at the d’Italie with Aunt Philippa before going to The Choice at Wyndhams. Quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore. We live in water-tight compartments. Now I am absorbed in the trivial round of House politics. Graves has played hell with the house. Apthorpe a house-captain and O’Malley on the Settle. The only consolation was seeing the woe on Wheatley’s fat face when the locker list went up. He thought he was a cert for the Settle this term. Bad luck on Tamplin though. I never expected to get on but I ought by all rights to have been above O’Malley. What a tick Graves is. It all comes of this rotten system of switching round house-tutors. We ought to have the best of Heads instead of which they try out ticks like Graves on us before giving them a house.
If only we still had Frank.
Charles’s handwriting had lately begun to develop certain ornamental features—Greek E’s and flourished crossings. He wrote with conscious style. Whenever Apthorpe came past he would turn a page in the history book, hesitate and then write as though making a note from the text. The hands of the clock crept on to half past seven when the porter’s handbell began to sound in the cloisters on the far side of Lower Quad. This was the signal of release. Throughout the House Room heads were raised, pages blotted, books closed, fountain pens screwed up. “Get on with your work,” said Apthorpe; “I haven’t said anything about moving.” The porter and his bell passed up the cloisters, grew faint under the arch by the library steps, were barely audible in the Upper Quad, grew louder on the steps of Old’s House and very loud in the cloister outside Head’s. At last Apthorpe tossed the Bystander on the table and said “All right.”
The House Room rose noisily. Charles underlined the date at the head of his page—Wednesday Sept. 24th, 1919—blotted it and put the notebook in his locker. Then with his hands in his pockets he followed the crowd into the dusk.
To keep his hands in his pockets thus—with his coat back and the middle button alone fastened—was now his privilege, for he was in his third year. He could also wear coloured socks and was indeed at the moment wearing a pair of heliotrope silk with white clocks, purchased the day before in Jermyn Street. There were several things, formerly forbidden, which were now his right. He could link his arm in a friend’s and he did so now, strolling across to Hall arm-in-arm with Tamplin.
They paused at the top of the steps and stared out in the gloaming. To their left the great bulk of the chapel loomed immensely; below them the land fell away in terraces to the playing fields with their dark fringe of elm; headlights moved continuously up and down the coast road; the estuary was just traceable, a lighter streak across the grey lowland, before it merged into the calm and invisible sea.
“Same old view,” said Tamplin.
“Give me the lights of London,” said Charles. “I say, it’s rotten luck for you about the Settle.”
“Oh, I never had a chance. It’s rotten luck on you.”
“Oh, I never had a chance. But O’Malley.”
“It all comes of having that tick Graves instead of Frank.”
“The buxom Wheatley looked jolly bored. Anyway, I don’t envy O’Malley’s job as head of the dormitory.”
“That’s how he got on the Settle. Tell you later.”
From the moment they reached the Hall steps they had to unlink their arms, take their hands out of their pockets and stop talking. When Grace had been said Tamplin took up the story.
“Graves had him in at the end of last term and said he was making him head of the dormitory. The head of Upper Dormitory never has been on the Settle before last term when they moved Easton up from Lower Anteroom after we ragged Fletcher. O’Malley told Graves he couldn’t take it unless he had an official position.”
“How d’you know?”
“O’Malley told me. He thought he’d been rather fly.”
“Typical of Graves to fall for a tick like that.”
“It’s all very well,” said Wheatley, plaintively, from across the table; “I don’t think they’ve any right to put Graves in like this. I only came to Spierpoint because my father knew Frank’s brother in the Guards. I was jolly bored, I can tell you, when they moved Frank. I think he wrote to the Head about it. We pay more in Head’s and get the worst of everything.”
“Tea, please.”
“Same old College tea.”
“Same old College eggs.”
“It always takes a week before one gets used to College food.”
“I never get used to it.”
“Did you go to many London restaurants in the holidays?”
“I was only in London a week. My brother took me to lunch at the Berkeley. Wish I was there now. I had two glasses of port.”
“The Berkeley’s all right in the evening,” said Charles, “if you want to dance.”
“It’s jolly well all right for luncheon. You should see their hors d’oeuvres. I reckon there were twenty or thirty things to choose from. After that we had grouse and meringues with ices in them.”
“I went to dinner at the d’Italie.”
“Oh, where’s that?”
“It’s a little place in Soho not many people know about. My aunt speaks Italian like a native so she knows all those places. Of course, there’s no marble or music. It just exists for the cooking. Literary people and artists go there. My aunt knows lots of them.”
“My brother says all the men from Sandhurst go to the Berkeley. Of course, they fairly rook you.”
“I always think the Berkeley’s rather rowdy,” said Wheatley. “We stayed at Claridges after we came back from Scotland because our flat was still being done up.”
“My brother says Claridges is a deadly hole.”
“Of course, it isn’t everyone’s taste. It’s rather exclusive.”
“Then how did our buxom Wheatley come to be staying there, I wonder?”
“There’s no need to be cheap, Tamplin.”
“I always say,” suddenly said a boy named Jorkins, “that you get the best meal in London at the Holborn Grill.”
Charles, Tamplin and Wheatley turned with cold curiosity on the interrupter, united at last in their disdain. “Do you, Jorkins? How very original of you.”
“Do you always say that, Jorkins? Don’t you sometimes get tired of always saying the same thing?”
“There’s a four-and-sixpenny table d’h
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Martin Amis observes that Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited “squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe”. It bemoans the decline of the English nobility: in this sense it becomes a “meditation on the state of England”.
The deep foundations of the country-house novel
The renewed interest in this genre might seem anachronistic, but there are good reasons for its perennial fascination
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Look what I got in the mail today!
And this post is number 500 - great thanks to everyone who follows :-)
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понедельник, 18 апреля 2011
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The Lygons:
Madresfield
- Lygon, Dorothy b. 22 Feb 1912, d. 13 Nov 2001
- Lygon, Henry Beauchamp, 4th Earl Beauchamp b. 5 Jan 1784, d. 8 Sep 1863
- Lygon, Margaret b. 8 Oct 1874, d. 12 Dec 1957
- Lygon, William b. 1642, d. 1721
- Pyndar, Reginald
- Russell, Arthur Oliver Villiers, 2nd Baron Ampthill b. 19 Feb 1869, d. 7 Jul 1935
Madresfield Court
- Lygon, Frederick, 6th Earl Beauchamp b. 10 Nov 1830, d. 19 Feb 1891
- Lygon, Reginald b. 1712, d. 25 Dec 1788
- Lygon, William Beauchamp, 2nd Earl Beauchamp b. c 1783, d. 12 May 1823
- Lygon, William, 1st Earl Beauchamp b. 25 Jul 1747, d. 21 Oct 1816
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Among the “Bright Young Things” of British society during the 1920s, few shone quite as brightly as Harold Acton. Known for his flamboyant dandyism and his extraordinary demeanor, he was the object of frequent mention in gossip columns and the inspiration for the notorious Anthony Blanche, the outr
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The late Russell Kirk spoke often of “the moral imagination.” By it he referred to that whole backdrop, or set of underpinnings, that corroborates for us mortals the fixities of the moral law. We are not angels: hence we do not encounter Reality directly. We are protected (“from heaven and damnation,” says Eliot) by the merciful arch, or filter, we might say, of the temporal and spatial, which bring with them the forms and colors that address our imaginations.
When we use this phrase, moral imagination, we do not mean that the moral world exists only in the realm of fancy. Rather we refer to the vision of good and evil that we find in works of fiction. It is a vision that not only suffuses these works, but also presides over the terms of these fictions, nay, that determines the very stuff and texture of them.
Take, for example, the fourteenth-century Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman: here we have, in an allegory to be sure, not merely the picture of a personality, or of a whole world, but, beyond these, the vision of what constitutes goodness and badness. Or take Gawain: the trouble in that poem is that Gawain has sinned (not that he is “out of touch with his feelings,” or that he has been “victimized”). There is a moral litmus test brought to bear on his behavior. In The Faerie Queene, all the thick woods and grottoes and hags and perils are to be understood in moral, and not merely psychological, or linguistic, terms. In Measure for Measure, the thing that has them all apoplectic in Vienna is the matter of sin and its punishment. We playgoers may enjoy the leisure and luxury of beholding fascinating personalities at work—Isabella and Angelo and Lucio and Claudio—but the nub of the drama is a moral matter.
The Waning of Moral Imagination
It is not without significance that we often reach for Renaissance and pre-Renaissance fiction when we speak of the moral imagination. By the time we get to Fielding, and then Jane Austen, Trollope, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, we are not sure that “moral” is altogether the apt word. To be sure, all of these authors undergird their stories, in some sense, with a world of moral suppositions. Trollope, for example, shows how all the dramatic currents and countercurrents flow over a bed, so to speak, of moral assumptions. The sanctity of marriage is there, for example, and truthfulness, and generosity, and fidelity to one’s duties, and benevolence: it is all there. But the main thing that engages our attention in Barset, or among the Pallisers, is not a rock-bottom question about goodness and evil; Trollope has not set out primarily to extol morality or religious truth.
Walker Percy makes this distinction, speaking of fiction:
Let me define the sort of novelist I have in mind. . . . He is . . . a writer who has an explicit and ultimate concern with the nature of man and the nature of reality. . . . One might apply to the novelist such adjectives as “philosophical,” “metaphysical,” “prophetic,” “eschatological,” and even “religious.”. . . Such a class might include writers as diverse as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Camus, Sartre, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor. Sartre, one might object, is an atheist. He is, but his atheism is “religious” in the sense intended here: that the novelist betrays a passionate conviction about man’s nature, the world, and man’s obligation in the world. By the same token, I would exclude much of the English novel—without prejudice: I am quite willing to believe that Jane Austen and Samuel Richardson are better novelists than Sartre and O’Connor. The 19th century Russian novelists were haunted by God; many of the French existentialists are haunted by his absence. The English novelist is not much interested one way or another. The English novel traditionally takes place in a society as every one sees it and takes it for granted. If there are vicars and churches prominent in the society, there will be vicars and churches in the novel. If not, not. So much for vicars and churches. ( The Message in the Bottle. New York. 1982. p. 103).
Waugh Steals a March
It is not to be urged that Evelyn Waugh should be thought the equal of Tolstoy, or even of Jane Austen. Nevertheless, his fiction raises piquant questions, if we are speaking of the moral imagination and twentieth-century English language fiction—particularly Brideshead Revisited. But his Sword of Honor trilogy also would certainly raise similar questions, most notably in the figure of the protagonist’s father, old Gervase Crouchback. We would need to undertake a wide canvass in order to discover another character in recent fiction who exhibits in such stark colors the quality that we can only call holiness. We, jades that we moderns are, find ourselves hailed, against all plausibility, with holiness—that is the only word for it—in the figure of Gervase Crouchback. And it is done, mirabile dictu, without the faintest whiff of sentimentality.
But in Brideshead Revisited, Waugh has done the almost unthinkable. He has given us (jades, if the accusation is not too fierce) a full-blown acclamation of Catholic piety, vision, morals, and dogma, but in terms that steal a march past merely modern sensibilities, and in fact virtually swamp those sensibilities.
It might be put this way: we are a skeptical epoch. Waugh’s book is full of skepticism: indeed, the narrator is a card-carrying skeptic. Charles Ryder, the protagonist, is a thoroughly modern man. We might congratulate ourselves on being a somewhat cynical epoch—and the book is redolent of cynicism. Again, we are an unbelieving era, and the whole drama in Brideshead is seen through the lens of unbelief. Yet again, we are most certainly a highly self-conscious era—and the narrator in Brideshead is agonizingly self-conscious, almost paralytically so. (In the BBC television series, Jeremy Irons, in depicting Charles Ryder, displayed incredible dramatic prowess by making the reticent, self-conscious, laconic Charles a figure who seizes and holds our attention, and affection even.)
Oddly, Brideshead would seem able to take its place entirely comfortably on the shelf of modern fiction (as opposed to other fiction which has religious overtones, like that of Tolkien or Williams or Chesterton, for whom categories like “fantasy,” and “metaphysical thriller” have to be invoked). And yet Brideshead takes us all the way in to the world of Christian belief, piety, and dogma.
Upstaging & Disarming
How does Waugh do it? My hunch is that he does it by bravado. It is bravado that is Waugh’s trump card. Knowing that he is writing in a highly blas