From left: Sir Mungo MacCallum, Vice-Chancellor Professor R S...

[Brideshead]

From left: Sir Mungo MacCallum, Vice-Chancellor Professor R S Wallace, Sir Philip Game (Governor of NSW), Chancellor Sir William Cullen, Earl Beauchamp and Dr Cecil Purser, photo, SMH 1 October 1930

There was no provision before 1951 for conferring of honorary degrees by the University of Sydney. Therefore, until the ‘University and University Colleges Act 1900’ was amended confirming Senate’s power to confer honorary degrees, the University awarded a number of degrees ‘ad eundem gradum’ - mostly Doctor of Laws - as a mark of honour. Those who received this award included members of the Royal Family, Governors-General, distinguished soldiers and leaders of industry.

The ad eundem gradum degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon Earl Beauchamp, Chancellor of London University, by the Chancellor Sir William Cullen at a ceremony held at 2.45pm on Tuesday 30 September 1930.

A special recital on the University War Memorial Carillon was given beforehand at 2.00pm in honour of the visit of Earl Beauchamp. The programme was played by Mr J G Fletcher, Busby Musical Scholar and Honorary Carillonist, and consisted of University and folk songs, English melodies and classical music.

Earl Beauchamp was visiting Australia and New Zealand on a health trip. He had been Governor of NSW and Visitor to the University some 30 years earlier.

@темы: lord marchmain, i am not i

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Noakes guide to Worcestershire: Acton Beauchamp

[Brideshead]

Noakes guide to Worcestershire: Acton Beauchamp:

John Noake was one of the prolific writers on Worcestershire of the Nineteenth Century, working with the County’s archives, newspapers and church papers. In this Guide, Noake gives a few paragraphs to each town and village. His comments on the church reflect the main interest of Victorian visitors, as well as offering the possibility of tea at the vicarage! Remember that developments in the techniques of history and archaeology and the availability of many more documents in recent times has rendered some of the information doubtful or incorrect. But Noake has an interesting style and his writing is worth reading. This blog is a weekly breakdown of his guide.

If you can’t wait for more, the full text is available online at Noake Guide Online

@темы: brideshead, i am not i

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Byrne mentions that this rocking horse was an absolute favourite...

[Brideshead]

Byrne mentions that this rocking horse was an absolute favourite of the Lygon children.

@темы: brideshead, i am not i

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Photo

[Brideshead]

@темы: oxford

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Brideshead Revealed: What does the story of the real Flyte family tell us about Waugh himself?

[Brideshead]

Peter Parker

October 14, 2009

On March 13, 1944, Evelyn Waugh informed his friend Lady Dorothy Lygon: “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”. This book would be published the following year as Brideshead Revisited, and would portray a family not unlike the Lygons of Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, who were indeed rich, (mostly) beautiful, high born and had more than their fair share of troubles with sex and drink, which they in fact found quite hard to bear. Paula Byrne’s object in writing Mad World was “to find the hidden key to Waugh’s great novel, to unlock for the first time the full extent to which Brideshead encodes and subtly transforms the author’s own experience”.

The important words here are “the full extent”, since anyone who knows anything about Waugh will find few startling revelations in this account. As soon as Brideshead Revisited was published, indeed, people recognized that the Lygon family had inspired the Flytes. In receipt of an advance copy of the book, “Chips” Channon wrote in his diary: “It is obvious that the mise-en-sc

@темы: books, waugh, i am not i

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"You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I..."

[Brideshead]

“You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

-

Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford.

And this post is number 600.

@темы: waugh, religion

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A house and its history

[Brideshead]

7 June 2008

Paula Byrne

Review of the book: Madresfield: The Real Brideshead, by Jane Mulvagh

The new Brideshead Revisited film, out in September, was, like the 1981 television version, filmed at Castle Howard. For Jane Mulvagh, however, the ‘real’ Brideshead was Madresfield Court near Malvern in Worcestershire, a lovely moated house that has been in the Lygon family, headed by successive Earls Beauchamp, for nearly 1,000 years. This new book is a lovingly descriptive account of the house and the family history.

The architecture of Brideshead — which does not have a moat — draws on Castle Howard, but Waugh’s famous description of the art nouveau chapel is based precisely on the one designed for Madresfield by the great Arts and Crafts artist, C. R. Ashbee: ‘Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic sсript, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours.’ In other respects, Madresfield Court was more of a model for Hetton Abbey, the house in A Handful of Dust. ‘The real Hetton’ would have been a more accurate, but less eye-catching subtitle for Mulvagh’s book.

We must never forget to retain those inverted commas around the word ‘real’. One of the keys to Waugh’s art was his way of combining pairs of real-life models into glorious fictional creatures: Brideshead is both Madresfield and Castle Howard, just as Sebastian Flyte is both Hugh Lygon and Alastair Graham, Anthony Blanche both Harold Acton and Brian Howard.

Jane Mulvagh begins and ends her story with Waugh, but her real interest is the history of the house itself. Her original and engaging structural device is to take a painting, an artefact, a treasure and let it reveal the story of the family and their connections. Thus ‘The Tuning Fork’ is about Elgar, who allegedly portrayed Mary Lygon in the 13th of his Enigma Variations, and ‘The Portrait’ recounts the attempted plot to overthrow Queen Mary in favour of Elizabeth. The life of Renaissance man Richard Lygon is vividly explored in a chapter entitled ‘The Herbs’. Paradoxically, Mulvagh is often at her best when away from Madresfield, writing of Richard on his sugar plantation in Barbados and a successor in the bustling commercial world of late 17th-century London.

Another chapter reiterates the common view that the long-standing Jennens court case, which touched the Lygon family, was fictionalised by Charles Dickens as ‘Jarndyce v. Jarndyce’ in Bleak House. This is a claim vigorously challenged by recent scholarship, not least because Dickens began the novel in 1851, when the Jennens litigation had lain dormant for many years.

Mulvagh’s style is that of the breathless schoolgirl. She writes sensationally of the scandal that beset the family in the 1930s and how a house fire revealed hidden documents: ‘Out of the charred remains the firemen pulled some diaries. The complete story could now be told.’ And what do the recovered journals tell? That Lady Sibell Lygon had been on the black velvets and was shouted at by her uncle, the Duke of Westminster, the man responsible for her father’s undoing.

Similarly, Mulvagh makes a song and dance of a letter of Lady Beauchamp’s regarding her knowledge of her husband’s homosexual proclivities, discovered in ‘a locked black box’ in the Madresfield muniment room. She seems blissfully unaware that this frank and moving testimony exists in multiple copies (one for each of the children) and has been cited in more than one previous study.

The downfall of Earl Beauchamp, a champion of the Liberal cause, a family man hounded from office because of his bisexuality, is an extraordinary story. It deserves to be told accurately, so it is disappointing that Mulvagh seems more concerned to dish the news on a scandal than to get her facts straight. So, for example, she confuses Evelyn Waugh with his friend and love-rival ‘Frisky’ Baldwin and the travel writer Robert Byron with Robert Harcourt Byron, the tall, blue-eyed Australian valet who travelled with the Earl during his exile. Her most egregious mistake is the statement that Waugh did not meet Lord Beauchamp: they did, in circumstances crucial to the genesis of Brideshead.

In Great Malvern library, down the road from Madresfield, there is a book of fascinating testimonies from servants and local people about the great house. A rudimentary (and back-breaking) contraption known as the Donkey was used to clean and polish the staircases. The perspective of below-stairs life, in the style of Gosford Park, would have added another dimension that is sadly missing from this lively but flawed book.

Paula Byrne is writing a life of Lady Dorothy Lygon.

@темы: books, brideshead, i am not i

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Alexander Waugh on Paula Byrne's "Mad World"

[Brideshead]

Evelyn Waugh first visited Madresfield, the Worcestershire seat of the Earls Beauchamp, in October 1931, shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday. He had been a friend of the heir, Lord Elmley, at Oxford and, according to Paula Byrne’s new book, was also, briefly, lover of a younger son, the attractive, alcoholic Hugh Lygon. But Waugh’s first visit to the house was not on the invitation of either of these two: it followed from a recommendation of Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman to enlist at Captain Jack Hance’s famous Riding Academy in Malvern. At a dinner in London, he was introduced to a Lygon sister and through this connection was brought several times to Madresfield during his week-long stay at a nearby hotel. The Lygon paterfamilias, Lord Beauchamp, was abroad, exiled on threat of arrest for homosexuality, and Lady Beauchamp, from whom he was divorced, no longer lived in the house. This left the younger generation in giddy command of an enormous, well-run, moated treasure palace. It is well known that Waugh was entranced by ‘Mad’ (as the house was known) and by the lively siblings who lived there, forming deep, lifelong friendships with two of the Lygon sisters, Ladies Mary and Dorothy. It is also well known that the family and the spirit of the house inspired the story of Brideshead Revisited.

Waugh hated it when readers tried to identify real people behind the masks of his fictional characters. ‘Fuck you,’ he wrote to his friend Ann Fleming in 1961 when she guessed that Brigadier Bob Laycock was the model for Captain Ivor Claire in Unconditional Surrender. ‘For Christ’s sake lay off the idea of Bob=Claire … Just shut up about Laycock.’ ‘If she breathes a suspicion of this cruel fact,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘it will be the end of our friendship.’ An ‘author’s note’ at the beginning of Brideshead reads, ‘I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they. EW’, and to Dorothy Lygon he said at the time of his writing Brideshead:

It’s all about a family whose father lives abroad, as it might be Boom [your father] - but it’s not Boom - and a younger son: people will say he is like Hughie, but you’ll see he’s not really Hughie - and there’s a house as it might be Mad, but it isn’t really Mad.

Few have taken Waugh at his word, though Dorothy Lygon (clearly the model for Cordelia Flyte) loyally wrote: ‘When I first read it [Brideshead], it did not seem to me he had used us as characters.’ Her sister Mary, however, instantly recognised aspects of Hughie in Waugh’s portrait of the dissolute aristocrat Sebastian Flyte. The art-deco chapel at Brideshead is indisputably modelled on the private chapel at Madresfield, the park and drive are also Madresfield, and there are hundreds of other connections between real life and the apparently fictional world of Brideshead. If Waugh were still alive and had any ‘Fuck You’s left in his breath he would be directing them now at Paula Byrne - not because her book is unsympathetic to Waugh (unlike many of his biographers she seems to be entirely on his side), but because her whole thesis is devoted to the unpicking of real history from the intricate shadow of Waugh’s fiction.

In her dedication to this singular task Byrne has been exceptionally zealous. I know this because she came several times to rummage through my archive. She was a most welcome guest but it was only with the utmost strength that I succeeded in refusing her entreaties to be shown bundles of letters that had been entrusted to me on the strict understanding that I would not reveal them to anyone. In the end I compromised by summarising a few of them in my own words. The keeper of the National Archives at Kew was less resilient. Somehow Byrne succeeded in persuading him to release to her the divorce petition of Lord and Lady Beauchamp that was supposed to be kept as a closed file until 2032. It is a lurid document that details incidents of fellatio, sodomy and intercrural masturbation, naming eleven men (mostly household servants) with whom Lord Beauchamp had committed ‘acts of gross indecency’. She even managed to outperform detectives at the time by uncovering further names of Beauchamp boyfriends including one servant-lover, confusingly called Robert Byron.

Lord Beauchamp’s forced exile was precipitated by the jealousy of his brother-in-law, Bendor, Duke of Westminster, whom Waugh later described as of ‘mediocre intelligence, liable to aberrations of malevolence … a man whose restlessness and capricious vanity made him less than universally loved’. An understatement - the Duke was detested by his Lygon nephews and nieces, who never forgave him for his involvement in their father’s downfall.

Waugh first met Beauchamp on the occasion of his confirmation in Rome in the summer of 1932. They got on well together and there can be little doubt that the older man was used as one of several models for the exiled father in Brideshead, Lord Marchmain. Another, incidentally, was Hubert Duggan (a onetime boyfriend of Mary Lygon), whose deathbed conversion in October 1943, aided, abetted and witnessed by Waugh, inspired Lord Marchmain’s similar final act of Christian acceptance - a sign of the cross.

At the time that Waugh was writing Brideshead, between February and June 1944, his old friend, Hugh, was long dead, killed in an unexplained accident in Germany in August 1936, involving a car, a pavement, a lot of hot sun and, one suspects, a large amount of alcohol. ‘A sweet, sweet man … He was one of the gentlest of them all, very knowledgeable, very quiet,’ is how Sir Alexander Glen (who led Waugh and Lygon on a near fatal expedition to Spitsbergen in 1934) remembered him. ‘It is the saddest news I ever heard,’ Waugh wrote. ‘I shall miss him bitterly.’ As in Brideshead, where the youthful homosexual love of Charles Ryder for Sebastian Flyte matures into the richer devotion of Charles for Sebastian’s sister, Julia, so, in real life, Evelyn’s friendship grew away from Hugh towards his younger sister Mary Lygon. There is something ineffably moving about the Evelyn-Mary Lygon relationship - always platonic, sometimes smutty, humorous, loyal, deep and lifelong. In their letters to one another - some of them reproduced here for the first time - an extraordinary bond is revealed, one that I find far more memorable and affecting than the relationships that are revealed in the pages of Waugh’s correspondence with his other close female friends, Ann Fleming, Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford.

Paula Byrne’s Mad World skilfully traces the bonds not just between Waugh and the Lygons but between all the Lygons themselves - their passion for their father, their ambiguous attitude to their mother, the terrible rift caused by Beauchamp’s ignominious exile, the cruelty of Elmley to his younger brother in financial distress, Elmley’s marriage to a divorc

@темы: books, waugh

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Mad World by Paula Byrne

[Brideshead]

Evelyn Waugh’s fans will find much to admire in this account of the troubled family who inspired Brideshead Revisited, says Selina Hastings

• The Observer, Sunday 16 August 2009

One of the first to see a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was his old friend Nancy Mitford. “A great English classic in my humble opinion,” she told him, a view now shared by millions of readers worldwide. Since its publication in 1945, a vast amount has been written about the novel and about the striking similarities between two families, the fictional Flytes and the real-life Lygons. The parallels seem almost infinite – between Lord Beauchamp and Lord Marchmain, Hugh Lygon and Sebastian, and the two great houses, magnificent Brideshead and Madresfield, the Lygons’ moated manor house in Worcestershire.

Paula Byrne is the latest to explore the people and the story that inspired the book and she does so with acuity and panache. Her stated aim is to portray Waugh through his friendship with the Lygons, and in the process reveal some substantial new information about the high-society scandal that in 1931 electrified the country. The very grand Lord Beauchamp, Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire, Lord Steward of the Household, Lord President of the Council, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and father of seven children, was outed as a practising homosexual and forced into exile abroad by his crazy brother-in-law, Bendor, Duke of Westminster. (“Dear Bugger-in-Law, You got what you deserved,” wrote Westminster, triumphantly, after Beauchamp’s disgrace.) Lady Beauchamp, horrified, fled the house never to return, leaving Madresfield, fully staffed, at the disposal of five of the children, with only a governess to keep an eye on them. And it was here one evening, shortly after their father’s departure, that Evelyn Waugh arrived for the first time to stay.

Evelyn had been at Oxford with Hugh Lygon, the middle son, with whom, according to one not wholly reliable source, he had conducted an affair. Certainly, he had been bewitched by gentle, charming Hughie, many of whose characteristics – girlish beauty, floppy blond locks, the ubiquitous teddy bear – famously reappear in the portrayal of Sebastian, with whom Charles Ryder is so infatuated in the novel. Yet for all his charm, Hughie was rather a dull dog, and hopelessly alcoholic, and it was with Hugh’s sisters that Waugh formed a far more fruitful friendship, especially with Lady Mary and Lady Dorothy, or Maimie and Coote as they were more informally known. His letters to the girls – comic, tender, playfully obscene – are some of the most delightful he ever wrote.

Byrne understands very well the powerful enchantment that Madresfield, or “Mad” as the girls called it, cast over Waugh. The beauty of the place, the limit-less freedom, the traditions of centuries juxtaposed with childish high spirits and silliness, all proved irresistible to the penniless young man from Golders Green. Byrne entertainingly summarises his career up to this point – the childhood, the schooldays, the melancholia and debauchery of Oxford, the schoolmastering and the first published works – and layers in with this the story of the Lygons, of Lord Beauchamp’s early life, and of those of his wife and children. Inevitably, the grander family suffers by comparison; they are none of them half so fascinating as Waugh and it is only when the novelist walks on that the stage properly lights up. Byrne shows remarkable perception in her interpretation not only of Waugh’s relationship with the Lygons, but of theirs with each other. The girls in particular remained fiercely loyal to their father, taking turns to accompany him on his eternal circuit of grand hotels, in Paris and Venice, in New York and in Australia, where in happier times he had presided as governor of New South Wales.

Most poignant is the story of Maimie, one of the most beautiful debutantes of her generation, once even considered as a future royal bride, who ended up drunk, lonely and fat after a miserable marriage to a penniless Russian prince. It is Waugh’s friendship with Maimie that leads Byrne to one of her most interesting insights. Discussing Waugh’s failure in depicting the sexual relationship between Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte, she says: “The irony is that the relationship between Charles and Julia would have been more successfully portrayed if it had been closer to that in real life between Evelyn and Maimie: a deep friendship, not a love affair. But Waugh’s hand was forced … [by] the structure of the novel.”

Essentially, what Mad World provides is a lively introduction to Waugh and to Brideshead, and to the rarefied social world in which much of the novel is set. To this is added a small amount of new material, to which, understandably, much emphasis is given. There is, too, a good deal of trumpeting of the superiority of the author’s critical sensibilities to those of her predecessors, many a blithe dismissal of those poor old dinosaurs, authors of “biographical doorstoppers”, which nobody wants to read nowadays.

As one of those dinosaurs, I have to concede that Byrne has a point: such big books are currently out of fashion, although I am delighted to see this has not prevented her from making copious use of their contents. Of her own discoveries, two are particularly intriguing: the information that Waugh was confirmed in Rome in 1932, and the physical details of what Lord Beauchamp actually did with all those handsome footmen behind the green baize door.

Much as I admire Mad World, I do have some reservations: source notes, disgracefully, are almost non-existent and the index is virtually useless. The author’s assertion that No

@темы: books, press, waugh, bubbles

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Peter Phillips: Set designer celebrated for his work on Granada TV's classic drama 'Brideshead Revisited'

[Brideshead]

By Derek Granger

April 12, 2011

In a distinguished 25-year career as a leading designer for Granada Television, Peter Phillips added greatly to the lustre of Granada’s drama output.

But undoubtedly his crowning achievement was his design concept for Brideshead Revisited, transmitted in 1981, for which he won a Bafta and which did much, along with Jane Robinson’s costume designs, to create what became known as “the Brideshead look”.

Featured in such fashionable places as the windows of Bloomingdale’s in New York, that look was one of opulence and luxury, but always, in Phillips’s hands, calculated to enhance rather than overpower the nostalgic mood of Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac novel. Phillips was initially reluctant to work on film design, believing that creating sets for the studio gave him greater artistic opportunity. But after overseeing the designs for “Craven Arms” by AE Coppard in Granada’s Country Matters series of 1972 he became an enthusiastic convert and undertook his Brideshead assignment as an exciting if testing challenge. Brideshead, which was to be shot on film and on location, was eventually to take almost two and a half sometimes turbulent years in the making. For Phillips, as for all the crew, it became a pioneering adventure unlike anything previously attempted in British television.

In 1978 Phillips and I began the search for the many required locations. In Venice we selected the Palazzo Barbaro for Lord Marchmain’s Italian hideaway. In Malta and Gozo, chosen to represent Morocco, Phillips made plans to simulate the look of North Africa by inserting within the walls of local alleyways indigenous Arabic archways. His passion for detail and keen aesthetic eye were invaluable in effecting these many transformations. In Charles Ryder’s rooms at Hertford College (the same which Waugh himself had occupied) each one of the pictures and objects described in the novel was in its rightful place. A classroom in a Manchester language school was converted, with the addition of wood panelling and an array of exotic bric-a-brac, into Sebastian’s rooms at Christ Church and included a specially constructed platform outside the window from which Anthony Blanche could declaim TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

To recreate the foyer of a smart Manhattan hotel he transformed the lobby of a disused Trafford Park asbestos factory; for the Atlantic liner sequence for which the deck scenes were shot on the QE2, he found eight different locations, including the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, which provided the ship’s dining room; the show room of a Kensington fashion store, which supplied the ship’s main lounge; the foyer of a Mayfair hotel, which stood in as the ship’s cocktail bar; and two specially constructed state rooms, built on rockers, designed in the art deco style that exemplified the streamlined marine architecture of the 1930s.

The crucial choice of Castle Howard for the baroque country seat of the Flyte family, a choice endorsed by the architectural historian James Lees-Milne, was taken after much deliberation. Because the grand state dining room had been destroyed by fire, Phillips set about creating a substitute in a disused basement. But perhaps his most important contribution was in persuading the enthusiastic owner, George Howard, to rebuild (with a little help from Granada’s budget) the burnt-out shell of the garden room. This ensured that the magnificent vista across the Great Hall through to the south front and to the Atlas Fountain and parkland beyond could once more be revealed not merely for the TV audience, but as a gloriously restored feature of the house itself.

Tenacious as his artistic supervision of Brideshead proved, it should not overshadow the notable contribution he made to Granada’s drama during its great heyday between the 1960s and 1980s. His work included an eight-part adaptation of Kipps, HG Wells’s study of an aspiring draper’s assistant, dramatisations of the satirical tales of Saki and a group of Edwardian domestic dramas including The Walls of Jericho and Olive Latimer’s Husband. He also worked on Galsworthy’s Strife, Paris 1900 (based on a series of French farces by Georges Feydeau) and a quartet of No

@темы: mini-series

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-cityoflove: Oxford, England

[Brideshead]

-cityoflove:

Oxford, England

@темы: oxford

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All human habitations were barred; the choice lay between the open down behind Spierpoint Ring and the single country road to the isolated Norman church of St. Botolph.

[Brideshead]

St. Botolph, an Abbot, died c.680. A very popular Saint in Medieval England, but little is known about him. With his brother Adulf he became a monk abroad and in 654 established a monastery at Icanhoh, usually identified with Boston (Botulf’s stone) in Lincolnshire. St. Cedfrid is said to have journeyed all the way from Wearmouth (Tyneside) to converse with this man - ” of remarkable life and learning”.

St. Botulph, the saint whose name is perpetuated in that of the American city of Boston, Massachusetts, was certainly an historical personage, though the story of his life is very confused and unsatisfactory. What information we possess about him is mainly derived from a short biography by Folcard, monk of St. Bertin and Abbot of Thorney, who wrote in the eleventh century (Hardy, Catalogue of Brit. Hist., I, 373). According to him Botulph was born of noble Saxon parents who were Christians, and was sent with his brother Adulph to the Continent for the purpose of study. Adulph remained aboard, where he is stated to have become Bishop of Utrecht, though his name does not occur in any of the ancient lists. Botulph, returning to England, found favour with a certain Ethelmund, “King of the southern Angles”, whose sisters he had known in Germany, and was by him permitted to choose a tract of desolate land upon which to build a monastery. This place, surrounded by water and called Icanhoe (Ox-island), is commonly identified with the town of Boston in Lincolnshire, mainly on account of its name (Boston=Botulph’s town). There is, however, something to suggest that the true spot may be the village of Iken in Suffolk which of old was almost encircled by the little river Alde, and in which the church is also dedicated to St. Botulph. In favour of Lincolnshire must be reckoned the fact that St. Botulph was much honoured in the North and in Scotland. Thus his feast was entered in the York calendar but not in that of Sarum. Moreover, even Folcard speaks of the Scots as Botulph’s neighbours (vicini). In favour of Suffolk, on the other hand, may be quoted the tradition that St. Botulph, who is also called “bishop”, was first buried at Grundisburgh, a village near Woodbridge, and afterwards translated to Bury St. Edmunds. This, however, may be another person, since he is always closely associated with a certain St. Jurmin (Arnold, Memorials of Bury, I, 352). That Botulph really did build a monastery at Icanhoe is attested by an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 654: Botulf ongan thoet mynster timbrian oet Yceanho, i.e. Botulph began to build the minster at Icanhoe. That the saint must have lived somewhere in the Eastern counties is proved by the indisputable evidence of the “Historia Abbatum” (Plummer’s Bede, I, 389), where we learn that Ceolfrid, Bede’s beloved master at Wearmouth, “journied to the East Angles in order that he might see the foundation of Abbot Botulphus, whom fame had proclaimed far and wide to be a man of remarkable life and learning, full of the grace of the Holy Spirit”, and the account goes on to say that Ceolfrid “having been abundantly instructed, so far as was possible in a short time, returned home so well equipped that no one could be found more learned than he either in ecclesiastical or monastic traditions”. Folcard represents St. Botulph as living and dying at Icanhoe in spite of the molestations of the evil spirits to which he was exposed at his first coming. Later accounts, e.g. the lessons of the Schleswig Breviary, suppose him to have changed his habitation more than once and to have built at one time a monastery upon the bank of the Thames in honour of St. Martin. His relics are said after the incursions of the Danes to have been recovered and divided by St. Aethelwold between Ely, Thorney Abbey, and King Edgar’s private chapel. What is more certain is that St. Botulph was honoured by many dedications of churches, over fifty in all, especially in East Anglia and in the North. His name is perpetuated not only by the little town of Boston in Lincolnshire with its American homonym, but also by Bossal in Yorkshire, Botesdale in Suffolk, Botolph Bridge in Huntingdonshire, and Botolph in Sussex. In England his feast was kept on 17 June, in Scotland on 25 June.

@темы: charles, motifs, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, religion

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Photo

[Brideshead]

@темы: oxford

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…he had filled with vermilion, carefully drawn, “Old English” capitals. The T alone remained...

[Brideshead]

…he had filled with vermilion, carefully drawn, “Old English” capitals. The T alone remained to do and for this he had selected a model from Shaw’s Alphabets, now open before him on the table.

The Shavian alphabet (also known as Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.

The letters used by Shaw are intentionally non-Latin so as to avoid the feeling that words are not spelled differently but simply misspelled.

The symbols can be seen here. I am not at all sure Shavian alphabet is what EW means here but I can find no other references. Anyone? Also, if it is, which letter would you choose for T? :-)

@темы: charles, motifs, Charles Ryder's Schooldays

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When Charles’s mother was killed there was a memorial service for her at Boughton, his home...

[Brideshead]

When Charles’s mother was killed there was a memorial service for her at Boughton, his home village…

Boughton is a village and civil parish in the Daventry district of Northamptonshire, England, about 4 miles (6.4 km) from Northampton town centre along the A508 road between Northampton and Market Harborough. The parish area straddles both side of the road but the main part of the village is east. It is on the northern fringe of the Northampton urban area and, together with the neighbouring village of Moulton is in the preferred area for the expansion of the town.

Просмотреть увеличенную карту

In the novel, Boughton is also mentioned by Mr Ryder:

I never had any myself except once from your cousin Alfred. Do you know in the summer before I was going up, your cousin Alfred rode over to Boughton especially to give me a piece of advice?

and also by Charles himself:

“Two Christmases” - those bleak, annual excursions into propriety. Boughton, home of my family, home of my cousin Jasper, with what glum memories of childhood I revisited its pitch-pine corridors and dripping walls!

@темы: charles, motifs, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, geography

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He read “There swimmeth One Who swam e’er rivers were begun, And under that Almighty Fin the...

[Brideshead]

He read “There swimmeth One Who swam e’er rivers were begun, And under that Almighty Fin the littlest fish may enter in” and “Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase” and “Under the wide and starry sky” and “What have I done for you, England, my England…?” and many others of the same comfortable kind…

HEAVEN
by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

Fish(fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud! — Death eddies near —
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.

Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as Chaucer) (3 August 1887 – 23 April 1915) was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War (especially The Soldier). He was also known for his boyish good looks, which prompted the Irish poet William Butler Yeats to describe him as “the handsomest young man in England”.

ABOU BEN ADHEM
by Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
“What writest thou?” The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”

“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”

The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And shoed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!

James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 1784 – 28 August 1859), best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist, poet and writer. He was a friend of Keats and Shelley.

REQUIEM
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

Here may the winds about me blow,
Here the sea may come and go
Here lies peace forevermo’
And the heart for aye shall be still.

This be the verse you grave for me:
“Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

I don’t think Stevenson needs any introducrion, but just in case here’s a Wikipedia link. One curious thing about Charles’s acquaitance with Stevenson is that

Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children’s literature and horror genres. Condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen) and her husband Leonard, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools.

ENGLAND, MY ENGLAND
by William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)

What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?
With your glorious eyes austere,
As the Lord were walking near,
Whispering terrible things and dear
As the Song on your bugles blown,
England—
Round the world on your bugles blown!

Where shall the watchful sun,
England, my England,
Match the master-work you’ve done,
England, my own?
When shall he rejoice agen
Such a breed of mighty men
As come forward, one to ten,
To the Song on your bugles blown,
England—
Down the years on your bugles blown?

Ever the faith endures,
England, my England:—
‘Take and break us: we are yours,
England, my own!
Life is good, and joy runs high
Between English earth and sky:
Death is death; but we shall die
To the Song on your bugles blown,
England—
To the stars on your bugles blown!’

They call you proud and hard,
England, my England:
You with worlds to watch and ward,
England, my own!
You whose mail’d hand keeps the keys
Of such teeming destinies,
You could know nor dread nor ease
Were the Song on your bugles blown,
England,
Round the Pit on your bugles blown!

Mother of Ships whose might,
England, my England,
Is the fierce old Sea’s delight,
England, my own,
Chosen daughter of the Lord,
Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword,
There ‘s the menace of the Word
In the Song on your bugles blown,
England—
Out of heaven on your bugles blown!

William Ernest Henley (23 August 1849 – 11 July 1903) was an English poet, critic and editor, best remembered for his 1875 poem “Invictus” (Latin for “unconquered”). At the age of 12, Henley fell victim to tuberculosis of the bone. A few years later, the disease progressed to his foot, and physicians announced that the only way to save his life was to amputate directly below the knee. It was amputated when he was 17. Victorian text-books professing stoicism were popular in English public schools, and in 1875, the Stoic ideal of indifference in the face of suffering inspired Henley to write his poem from a hospital bed. Despite his disability, he survived with one foot intact and led an active life until his death at the age of 53.

@темы: charles, motifs, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, all save poetry

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Some things have to be believed to be seen.

[Brideshead]

The poem—Ralph Hodgson’s “’Twould ring the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs …”—was one of Frank’s favourites.

The Bells of Heaven
’Twould ring the bells of heaven,
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs.
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers,
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.

Ralph Hodgson (9 September 1871 – 3 November 1962), Order of the Rising Sun (Japanese

@темы: charles, motifs, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, all save poetry

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Milton-on-his-blindness

[Brideshead]

“Mr. Graves. We’re to learn any poem we like.”
“And what have you chosen?”
“Milton-on-his-blindness.”

When I consider how my light is spent
E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

@темы: charles, motifs, Charles Ryder's Schooldays, all save poetry

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Photo

[Brideshead]

@темы: st sebastian

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Evelyn Waugh @ CatholicAuthors.com

[Brideshead]

Evelyn Waugh @ CatholicAuthors.com:

The most striking example of Chesterton’s influence on Waugh is to be found in the way that Chesterton inspired Brideshead Revisited, arguably the finest of Waugh’s novels and undeniably one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. The novel’s central theme of the redemption of lost souls by means of “the unseen hook and invisible line … the twitch upon the thread” was taken from one of Chesterton’s Fr. Brown stories. Waugh told a friend that he was anxious to obtain a copy of the omnibus edition of the Fr. Brown stories at the time he was putting the finishing touches on Brideshead, and a memorandum he wrote for MGM studios when a film version of the novel was being considered confirmed the profundity of Chesterton’s influence:

”The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman’s line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a ‘twitch upon the thread’ draws the fish to land.”

The Chestertonian metaphor was not lost on Ronald Knox when he first read Brideshead Revisited: “once you reach the end, needless to say the whole cast - even Beryl - falls into place and the twitch upon the thread happening in the very bowels of Metroland is inconceivably effective.”

In many respects, Waugh’s finest novel is a reiteration of the theme found in his article for the Daily Express. It is a tale of hope among the ruins of a vanishing civilization in which the light of Christianity shines out amidst the chaos.

Brideshead Revisited sold exceedingly well on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, the Tablet acclaimed it “a book for which it is safe to prophesy a lasting place among the major works of fiction.” In America, Time described Waugh as a stylist unexcelled among contemporary novelists.

The praise was tempered by a vociferous minority who disliked Brideshead Revisited on both political and religious grounds. In particular, the American critic Edmund Wilson criticized the religious dimension in the novel. “He was outraged (quite legitimately by his standards) at finding God introduced into my story,” Waugh replied. “I believe that you can only leave God out by making your characters pure abstractions.” Modern novelists, Waugh continued, “try to represent the whole human mind and soul and 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.”

With the publication of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh completed the metamorphosis from ultramodern to ultramontane, and in so doing passed from fashion to anti-fashion. As with so many of the other converts at the vanguard of the Catholic Literary Revival, his work was an act of subcreation reflecting the glory of creation itself. As Waugh himself put it: “There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.” What is true of art is as true of the artist. In the works of Waugh, as in the works of the other literary converts, a tiny gleam of Christ is always reflected.

@темы: waugh, religion