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[Documentary, 2005] Documentary on the legendary TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s famous novel “Brideshead Revisited”. Appearances and interviews to the cast and crew of this unforgettable series.
воскресенье, 24 апреля 2011
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Why does Brideshead Revisited have such a strong hold on our imagination? Evelyn Waugh’s beautiful dialogue plays its part, argues Christopher Hitchens, but the chief source of the novel’s power is its summoning of innocence lost on the fields of Flanders. Never mind that the new film version is a travesty: go back to the book
- The Guardian, Saturday 27 September 2008
As I drove away from a California screening of the new film version of Brideshead Revisited, I was amused to overhear the comments of my companions from the back seat. “I thought the one who played Jeremy Irons was a bit thin …” “I liked the Anthony Andrews character better … ” It is more than a quarter of a century since the late William F Buckley introduced the Granada TV series to the American viewers of the Public Broadcasting System, and the residual effect is one of what Harold Isaacs once called “scratches on the mind”: a very durable if sometimes vague cultural impression. (My son was born in 1984 and as I was carrying a teddy bear home, and happening that day to be wearing a white linen suit, I was astonished by the number of passers-by in Washington DC who shouted “Hi Sebastian!” at me as I tooled along.)
The directors Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg achieved their 1981 success by gorgeous photography, of course, and also by generally inspired casting. The locations, plainly, required little or no embellishment. And the music was suitably … well, evocative. But most of all, they were faithful to Evelyn Waugh’s beautiful dialogue and cadence, both in set-piece scenes and in sequences of languorous voice-over in Oxford and Venice and - perhaps decisively - in the opening passage, where the melancholic Captain Charles Ryder hears the almost healing word “Brideshead” spoken again: “a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such magic power, that, at its ancient sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight”.
Graham Greene once wrote that, in his own memory, that same inaugural passage had seemed very long and elaborate, and that he was surprised on rereading it to find how brief it was. He intended this as a compliment. I, too, find that Brideshead is oddly capacious and elastic, disclosing new depths and perspectives with each reading. Why does this novel have such a tenacious hold on the imagination, even of people who have never been to England or never visited a country house?
Well, to answer that first and easiest question, it is entirely possible to feel nostalgia for homelands, and for periods, which one has never experienced oneself. This applies to imagined times and places as well as to real ones: Waugh uses the phrase “secret garden” and also - alluding to the Oxford of Lewis Carroll - to an “enclosed and enchanted garden” reachable by a “low door in the wall”. The yearning for a lost or different upbringing is fairly universal, and one of Brideshead’s keys is precisely the one that unlocks the gate to it:
Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
This sentence, incidentally, puts the quietus on the ridiculous word “platonic” that for some peculiar reason still crops up in discussion of the story. Waugh’s unambiguous mention of “the catalogue of grave sins” also reminds us of his stated purpose in writing the book, which was “nothing less than an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world”. And this is the story’s second source of fascination: the struggle between the sacred and the profane. Critics have differed sharply here. Monsignor Ronald Knox was so much affected by Julia’s monologue on sin that he proposed to quote it to the clergy of Westminster Cathedral on their “Day of Recollection”, while George Orwell, who was reviewing Brideshead on his own deathbed, thought that the passing of Lord Marchmain and other kitschy scenes demonstrated the impossibility of being simultaneously grown-up and a Roman Catholic. It can’t be said that Waugh is merely propagandistically or proselytisingly Catholic in the novel: Sebastian is a doomed and sometimes vicious alcoholic, his elder brother, the devout Bridey, is an honest but ineffectual crank, his little sister Cordelia a sweet little frump who goes off to work for General Franco, and their mother a sort of ultra-glamorous witch, while all the priests are represented as either silly or simple. And as for Julia: the whore/Madonna complex might have been invented for her. Nonetheless, it can’t be doubted that Waugh was trying to do honour to English Catholicism and, as he later came to realise, was inadvertently engaged in commemorating the passing of its traditionalist wing. (He died as the full horror of the Second Vatican Council, with its abolition of the Latin or “Tridentine” mass, was becoming fully apparent to him. The recent rise of Josef Ratzinger might have struck him as another of the operations of divine grace.)
Fatally perhaps for his own cause, he thus identified the esoteric “elitism” of his religion with the “snobbery” that attached to the Marchmain lineage and its lovely country home. (Sebastian Flyte describes the English Catholics as a series of “cliques”, while Lord Marchmain freely allows that he himself is a caricature of “all that the socialists would have me be”.) At least Waugh was unapologetic about this, saying that “the novelist deals with the experiences which excite his imagination”, and adding that “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 rather not hear about them.’ I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.” This to me appears more than reasonable: it would be absurd and vulgar to indict Marcel Proust or Anthony Powell or PG Wodehouse for their emphasis on the upper crust. The test is not characters so much as characterisation. One of Waugh’s best minor figures is anything but aristocratic: the hapless clerk Hooper could have been invented by Charles Dickens or Arnold Bennett in a spare moment. Ryder plays a word-game with his name, changing the fashionable word “Youth” in modern discourse to the word “Hooper” and thus coming up with “Hooper Rallies”, “Hooper Hostels” and suchlike. Fair enough. But then try this, from Charles’s first lunch with Sebastian:
He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.
Or this, during the stolen summer holiday that leaves the naughty boys with Brideshead Castle all to themselves:
The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this - come and go with us through life …
In this rather sickly passage the word is even capitalised, but I doubt that Waugh wanted us, while the golden lads were splashing and romping, to substitute the word “Hooper” for it. So, if you must seek a conviction for “elitism”, look to the language and not to the sociology.
Look to the language, also, if you want to guess at meanings that may be only semi-conscious in the writer’s own mind: when Waugh tells us that “the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf”, does he intend the slightly saccharine repetition or is he unaware that he is being a little too … rich?
It comes as a shock to discover that Waugh nearly called Charles Ryder by the surname of Fenwick, and almost gave Cordelia the first name Bridget. (Such is the power of a great novel to make us feel that we own it almost as private property, as it were, and must resent any intrusion on our intimacy with it.) But evidently he gave some care and reflection to nomenclature. In one of his literary essays on sacred subjects, Father Robert Barron proposes that because “St Paul told the Corinthians that Christ is the Head of His Body the Church and, shifting the metaphor, that Jesus is the Bridegroom and the Church the Bride”, it follows that Waugh fuses these two Pauline images of Head and Bride to create the gracious mansion that lies at the core of the story. This may be plausible (the two images are widely separated in the Bible) but I feel on surer ground in proposing my profane counterpart to Barron’s sacred one. In the very name of Sebastian Flyte there is either a very great ingenuity or a very strong subliminal element. Recall the way in which Anthony Blanche says to him, with obvious flirtatiousness: “My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion”. Here the reference to the martyrdom of St Sebastian is obvious enough, and then it might occur to you - as it only did to me after several rereadings - that the word “flight” also happens to be the collective noun for a shower of arrows.
Pressing home with this analogy, one hits upon what may be the chief source of Brideshead’s potency. Even if only in distant and muffled tones, with the actual tragic action taking place off-stage
суббота, 23 апреля 2011
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Is the cult of Brideshead among Cantabridgians harmless fun, or does it conceal a regressive social agenda? Daniel Janes investigates…
It’s cold, somewhat clinical and nowhere near as compelling as other eighties serials such as Jewel in the Crown and Edge of Darkness. However, it is the 1981 Granada adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited that has most embedded itself into the public mind. Nowhere is this more evident than at Cambridge. Though set in the City of Dreaming Spires rather than the City of Perspiring Dreams, Brideshead’s serene lawns and stately courts have come to represent Oxbridge as a whole, or at least a quaint, elitist image of it.
This identification is so strong that the show is considered mandatory viewing for Oxbridge students. Brideshead DVD sessions - accompanied by liberal amounts of port, to turn the affectation of social exclusiveness up to eleven - are a fixture of JCRs. This mania is particularly common among wide-eyed first-years, still riveted by the novelty value of Oxbridge traditions, before Captain Tripos flogs them into anxious submission.
“The cult of Brideshead is so ridiculously deeply inculcated that even people who haven’t seen or read it can see themselves living it,” said third-year historian James Frecknall. “Myself, for instance.”
Despite the pervasiveness of the trend, an appraisal of student opinion suggests that, for many Cantabridgians, the TV serial can be something of an endurance test due to its excessively languid pacing.
Third-year historian Doug Johnson confesses that he has “never managed to make it even through the first episode without falling asleep”. To second-year lawyer Emma Brookes, the show is “paint-dryingly tedious at times”.
‘The pacing is incredibly slow,’ commented third-year, Engling Angus Ledingham. “I can’t imagine it being terribly successful if it was made now. In terms of period dramas and classic novel adaptations, Andrew Davies beat it hands down with both Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House. I sometimes wonder if the nostalgia is as much for that style of television as for the period it represents.”
Certainly, few would fault certain technical aspects of the serial. Among female students, Jeremy Irons’ droning narration is a particular draw, though to others it is agonising or unintentionally funny. Praise abounded for Geoffrey Burgon’s elegiac theme tune, Peter Phillips’ meticulous art direction and several of the performances, chiefly Nickolas Grace’s viciously camp Anthony Blanche and John Gielgud’s scene-stealing turn as Charles Ryder’s father, Edward.
For most, the cult of Brideshead is simply an innocuous way of recreating the fustier, amusingly outmoded aspects of the Oxbridge experience. However, for a section of conservatively-minded students, Brideshead Revisited is not just an escapist fantasy; it is an endorsement of the values of the Carlton Club. The Oxford of Brideshead is a socially exclusive world, untouched by the unwashed masses, access schemes and mixed-sex colleges. It is a world where tradition reigns supreme, where Stanley Baldwin is Prime Minister in perpetuity, where social problems evaporate amid pedantic discussions of the odes of Pindar. A world which, to many rightists, is sadly lost (though it is never as lost as they seem to think).
This conservative fetishisation of Brideshead was highlighted by Christopher Hitchens in his book Blood, Class and Empire. When the show first premiered on PBS, it was introduced by William F. Buckley, a giant of the modern conservative movement. Benjamin Hart, former director of the Heritage Foundation, even pilfered whole sections of the book for speeches endorsing traditional educational values. Reaganites admitted that it was primarily the TV show, not the book that had engaged them. The conservatives’ thraldom to the series reflects what Hitchens described as a “revival of a right-wing politics based on the defensive class-consciousness of the well-off”, reflected in the writings of Tom Wolfe. What is striking is about the popular image of Brideshead is that it is as if only the first four episodes of the TV series exist. Sebastian is celebrated as carefree and vital, ignoring the inconvenient fact that he becomes a depressed alcoholic hanger-on in a Moroccan monastery. The huge role played in the plot by Catholicism is also overlooked. As third-year historian Laura Marshall points out, “it is all about Catholic guilt”, and Evelyn Waugh “just can’t do Catholic guilt as well as Graham Greene”.
True, some of the story’s themes may have wider resonance. For Emma Brookes, “Brideshead is in part a story about loneliness and just wanting to belong, a second stab at childhood, themes that young people at a volatile time in their lives might relate to”. However, as Angus Ledingham suggests, there may be a more straightforward explanation for the series’ popularity: “Or maybe it’s just the unbearable toffs making prats of themselves.’
Daniel Janes
пятница, 22 апреля 2011
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The chapel at Charles’s school
was huge, bare, and still unfinished, one of the great monuments of the Oxford Movement and the Gothic revival.
The Oxford Movement was a movement of High Church Anglicans, eventually developing into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, whose members were often associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology. They conceived of the Anglican Church as one of three branches of the Catholic Church.
Canterbury Cathedral
The Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic or Neo-Gothic) is an architectural movement which began in the 1740s in England. Its popularity grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century, when increasingly serious and learned admirers of neo-Gothic styles sought to revive medieval forms, in contrast to the neoclassical styles prevalent at the time.
In English literature, the architectural Gothic Revival and classical Romanticism gave rise to the Gothic novel genre, beginning with Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, and inspired a 19th century genre of medieval poetry which stems from the pseudo-bardic poetry of “Ossian”. Poems like “Idylls of the King” by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson recast specifically modern themes in medieval settings of Arthurian romance. In German literature, the Gothic Revival also had a grounding in literary fashions.
I can’t resist the temptation and will show an example of Gothic revival in my hometown, one of the best I’ve seen ever.
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Walter Crane (1845–1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child’s nursery motif that the genre of English children’s illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the latter 19th century. His work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children’s stories for decades to come. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children’s books, ceramic tiles and other decorative arts.
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ON A warm evening in June 1931, the 59-year-old William Lygon, the 7th Earl of Beauchamp, sat dozing in a chair in the Moat Garden at Madresfield Manor. The embroidery he was completing had dropped into his lap. He could hear, just behind him, the unripe grapes tapping against the mullioned windows in the breeze.
Suddenly, four car doors slammed shut. A black, chauffeur-driven saloon had entered the estate, driven down the Gloucester Drive, over the cattle grid and drawn up on the gravel beyond the moat. Three formally-dressed men crossed the bridge into the court. It was clear from their solemnity that they had come on business. The ultimatum they brought with them would shatter the Lygons.
Bradford, the butler, showed the three Knights of the Garter into the drawing-room to await Earl Beauchamp. William left the Moat Garden and joined the visitors, who were all known to him. Lord Stanmore explained that they had been sent at the request of “the highest authority in the land”. His Majesty had been informed by Bend’or, the Duke of Westminster and William’s brother-in-law, that he could provide evidence of criminal acts of indecency between William and a number of men.
When King George had heard the allegations, he had reputedly muttered, “I thought men like that shot themselves.” He had been left in no doubt that Westminster would expose William, present the evidence to the press and have him arrested. According to the Constitution, a peer was entitled to be tried by fellow peers in the House of Lords. However, the thought of such a trial, in which male prostitutes would be subpoenaed, billets-doux read out and low-life exposed, had so horrified the King that he had decided to intervene. William was a friend of the King. He was too close to the Royal Family for comfort. To contain the crisis, the three knights were sent to persuade William to resign from all his official posts and to leave England by midnight.
Once the envoys had left Madresfield, William reviewed his options. He knew that Bend’or — his wife, Lettice’s brother — would file a writ and he was not prepared to see his children used as witnesses in a homosexuality case. The only members of his family who were at home were his 23-year-old daughter, Sibell, and her younger sister, Dorothy, 18. Forewarned, the countess had already fled to her brother’s Cheshire estate; their son, Dickie, was away at school; his recently married daughter, Lettice, was living in Herefordshire with her husband; Maimie was enjoying the London Season; Hugh was on his farm at Clevelode, near Malvern; and Viscount Elmley, the eldest son, was in his Norfolk constituency.
Over dinner in the great hall he presented the situation to his daughters and, to their horror, offered what he considered to be the only solution: suicide. His death, he assured them, would not take place in England and — for the family’s honour — it would look like an accident. He intended to take the overnight boat to the Continent and travel on to the German spa town Wiesbaden, where he would overdose on a sleeping draught. Though Sibell and Dorothy tried to dissuade him, he drew a line in black ink across a page of the visitors’ book, and departed from his devoted family and beloved Madresfield.
On his first night at Wiesbaden, William raised a glass of poisoned port to his lips, but the doctor on duty seized the glass from him. As the weeks passed in the spa, he began to put aside thoughts of suicide. Strengthened by rest and reflection, he decided to remain on the Continent until — as he thought it would be — the summons for his arrest was lifted and he could return home. Meanwhile, his children, fearing that he would take his life, decided that at all times one of them must watch over him. A dutiful rota began as the older children took their turn — week in week out, in Europe and further afield — by their father’s side. In the end, it was Hugh’s love of his father that persuaded him against taking his life.
William’s unmasking had been a long time coming. Since the mid-Twenties, stories had circulated about homosexual parties at which local youths and fishermen serviced the earl and his guests. But his undoing began in Australia. In August 1930 William had embarked on a round-the-world trip. He received an “overwhelming” welcome in Sydney and stayed for two months, accompanied by a servant from Madresfield and a young Liberal MP, Robert Bernays, who acted as his speechwriter. There was much to draw William to Sydney, where he was reputed to enjoy a varied sex life during his many visits. The earl and his valet shared a flat not as master and servant but as lovers, a domestic arrangement that did not go unnoticed. His hosts asked Robert Bernays to inform William that on a forthcoming formal visit to Canberra, the servant would not be received. The incident was reported throughout London society and Bend’or hired detectives to gather further evidence. William had broken the Eleventh Commandment, one held dear by his class: “Thou Shalt Not Get Caught.”
Apparently, Bend’or had never liked William. The womanising sportsman and the bisexual aesthete had little in common. Bend’or was an angry, unfulfilled man, “nothing but a fatuous, spoilt, ageing playboy”. Despite three marriages — and he would marry for a fourth time — he had sired only one male heir to William’s three. When Edward Grosvenor, Bend’or’s son, was just five, his father had insisted he ride out with the hunt, despite the child’s complaints of stomach pains. Edward died of peritonitis while in the field. Horrified by Bend’or’s harsh treatment of their son, his wife left him. By 1931, Bend’or was unhappily married to his third wife, Loelia Ponsonby. She claimed he got drunk every night and was unfaithful: yet while he enjoyed sexual freedom, he expected the highest standards of propriety from those around him, especially his family. So far as women were concerned, he was a prude and he suffered from overwhelming fits of jealousy. He frowned upon “irregular” relationships and crude jokes, and any hint of homosexuality angered him beyond measure.
Bend’or’s actions, far from shielding his sister and her children, put them in the spotlight. In the spring of 1931, three months before the three knights came to Madresfield, Bend’or had summoned the countess and, in the presence of three lawyers, had laid the evidence before her. He had recommended that she leave Madresfield immediately with her children, who ranged between the ages of 14 and nearly 28, and commence divorce proceedings. The countess, who had always been a somewhat obtuse and sheltered woman, was now in shock and was easily swayed by her brother. Ashamed and humiliated, she felt compelled to place a statement in personal columns acknowledging that she was well, but no longer lived with her husband.
Contrary to her newspaper notice, she suffered a nervous breakdown and took to her bed on her brother’s Cheshire estate. Bend’or had also instructed the Lygon children to testify against their father. They refused. All William’s children stood by him. Bend’or, now their greatest enemy, let it be known that anyone fraternising with the Lygons would be dropped by him. With a final flourish, he wrote William a curt letter: “Dear Bugger- in-Law, You got what you deserved. Yours, Westminster.” The battleground was set.
Sibell, William’s daughter, persuaded her lover, Lord Beaverbrook, to take action. The Canadian press baron controlled the Express newspaper group and had been Minister of Information. As a masterful manipulator, he suppressed the story that year in his own newspapers and ensured that it did not appear in rival ones. The children took a vow of silence regarding their father’s affairs and, isolated from society, they closed ranks. In the summer of 1931, before the visit of the Garter Knights, clandestine negotiations had been taking place between the University of London, where William was chancellor, the Prime Minister’s office and Buckingham Palace. William knew it was only a matter of time before his sexual antics were exposed.
Within days of his departure, contemporaries learnt that the “eccentric” Beauchamp had gone abroad “to have mud baths”, a euphemism for a Wildean exile. Anecdotes were exchanged with glee in drawing rooms up and down the land. How they tittered when they heard that, on having homosexuality explained to her, Lady Beauchamp referred to her husband as a “bugler”!
Diana Mosley, who was close to the Beauchamps, observed the story unfolding and recalled a sharp contrast in attitudes between the generations. While William’s homosexuality was known among many of her parents’ generation, “Lady Beauchamp preferred not to notice” and Diana Mosley’s father refused to discuss it. Nevertheless, “all our generation was on the side of Lord Beauchamp — completely”. What struck Diana Mosley most was how his children “supported him in every way. They loved him so much they were completely on his side — never wavered”.
William had recognised his true sexuality by the time he had started his university education at Oxford — if not earlier — and it sat uncomfortably with his strictly Christian upbringing. His accession to the title and its dynastic responsibilities were a burden to him; it is possible that his regular forays to the East End to work with the poor had served as a cover for his exploration of homosexual low-life in its “Molly houses”.
Repeating the decision made nearly 300 years earlier by Richard Ligon [sic] when he found himself on the wrong side at the end of the Civil War, William chose exile and commenced the life of a fugitive from justice at the end of June 1931. Following his stay at Wiesbaden, he would be in Paris one week, the next in Venice, Rome or Sydney.
Anxious about his children, William established a schedule whereby he wrote to each one, in turn, every Sunday, beginning with his eldest daughter Lettice. He requested that they share his letters with one another.
Over the coming years, William would seek out the sweet rains of Paris, the clefts in the rocks of Sydney’s Botany Bay, the valleys of San Francisco and the waters of Venice, in an almost ceaseless passage between the four cities of the world reputed to tolerate the homosexual community.
If William settled anywhere, it was in Sydney, where, he wrote, his “friends remain constant which makes it very tempting to me to buy a house and live there with visits from you and others”. His second son, Hugh, whose bankruptcy had recently been redeemed with a payment from his father, came out to Sydney to lick his wounds. Hugh was his favourite: according to Rosalind Morrison, Hugh’s niece, William intended to leave Madresfield to him and not to his first-born, Elmley.
Father and son passed cheerful days at Darling Point, Sydney, as recounted in a letter from William to Sibell in July 1933. They fell into a routine. William rose at 6.30am and swam in the pool. He then took the newspapers and then, having dressed and breakfasted, he would go into Sydney for a massage and a drink with friends before returning for “luncheon (never alone) at 1pm”. In the afternoon, they surfed on Bondi Beach, played tennis or boxed before a 6.45pm dinner “if there is anything on in Sydney and if not at 7.45pm” and bed by 11pm.
According to Sibell, “He never complained, never mentioned Bend’or again. He just bore it.” While William maintained relations with his children by post and anticipated their next visit, back in England Lady Beauchamp was even more isolated. Estranged from all her children, save for Dickie, she led a pitiful existence: alone, confused, ill and in thrall to her bullying brother. Lady Beauchamp’s children never made peace with her. She died in 1936 at 59.
By the time of his mother’s death, the 31-year-old Hugh was an alcoholic wrestling with his own homosexuality. While Dorothy and Sibell always denied his sexual leanings — perhaps it was more than they could bear as they watched their father suffer — friends knew otherwise. Since graduating from Oxford, he had struggled to find a role for himself and had sunk into melancholia.
Distraught after his mother’s funeral, he took a motoring holiday in Germany with his friend, the artist, Henry Wynn. On August 19, 1936, having driven through the countryside in an open-topped car, they arrived at dusk in Rothenburg, Bavaria. As Hugh stepped from the car he fell, overcome by heatstroke or drink. He fractured his skull on the kerbstone.
Desperate to reach his ailing son, William chartered a plane and travelled with Dorothy and Sibell to his bedside. It was too late. Hugh never regained consciousness and within three days he was dead. William was beside himself with grief. Despite the risk of imprisonment, he determined to return to Madresfield for the funeral. As a precaution, it was said that a Tiger Moth lay in wait for the earl’s escape, but such measures proved unnecessary. William was unaware that, once again, Sibell had intervened and, through Beaverbrook, she had prevailed upon Lord Simon to lift the arrest warrant, which was suspended and later annulled.
While the legal situation was still uncertain, after the funeral, William remained at Madresfield for just six days. The following spring, shortly after George VI’s coronation, William’s counsel, Sir Norman Birkett, wrote to the authorities. Since George V was now dead, perhaps his client could now officially return to England. If William were arrested, Birkett said he would defend his client against all charges and he was confident that he would win. The charges were dropped. William’s official return was recorded in the visitors’ book under a black-inked line by his signature and the date: “Beauchamp 19.vii.37”. Within days of his return, still full of fury at his wife who had colluded with her brother and wrecked the family, he had her image painted out with whitewash from the chapel fresco which had been conceived as a celebration of their family life. Her marble bust was thrown into the moat. There is a cinefilm of William taking tea with his children. Though surrounded by five liveried footmen, it is he who “plays mother”: pouring the tea and passing the cake plate. He steps to one side to watch his brood with tenderness and pride. What he had not confided in them was that they would have little time — he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
In the autumn of 1938 William was in New York attending a reunion of the Ligon family (as the American branch is named). While there, he fell gravely ill. Elmley just managed to get to New York in time and on November 15, 1938, in the Waldorf Astoria hotel, with Dorothy at his bedside, William died. His last words were: “Must we dine with the Elmleys tonight?”
Sibell, of all the Lygons the least squeamish about her father’s homosexuality, outlived her six siblings. Not long before her death, on being asked what she hoped for from a book about her family and her father she replied: “Just the truth. He was a very nice man and he did care so very much about his children. Mother was his greatest mistake and maybe because he was homosexual he made the wrong choice in marriage.” And what was her abiding memory of her father and what he had taught his children? “Tolerance. Always tolerance.”
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“I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich people, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons of sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays.”
- Evelyn Waugh to Lady Dorothy Lygon, March 13, 1944
- Evelyn Waugh to Lady Dorothy Lygon, March 13, 1944
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A photo cutout of the Lygon family: from left, Coote, Maimie, Lettice, Sibell, Lady Beauchamp, Boom, Elmley, Hugh, and Dickie. Photograph by Nic Barlow.
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Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death.
Peter Westcott lived with his harsh father and his invalid mother at Scaw House, near the town of Treliss in Cornwall. As he grew up, Peter made friends with Stephen Brant, a farmer who occasionally took the child to the Bending Mule Inn. One Christmas Eve at the inn, Peter watched Stephen fighting with another man over a girl. That night, he arrived home late from the Bending Mule, and his father gave him the most severe whipping he had yet received. On another day, Stephen took him to the curiosity shop operated by Zachary Tan…
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четверг, 21 апреля 2011
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