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“The wedding was an unparalleled success among the Lower Orders”
The picture is by EW himself.
воскресенье, 08 мая 2011
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10:38am Thursday 15th March 2007
By Chris Gray
As the Oxford Literary Festival gets under way next week at Christ Church, visitors to the city may find themselves looking for restaurants and bars with suitable connections where they can relax and eat during the event. They would do well to try The Oxford Retreat, in Hythe Bridge Street. This handsome pub could boast - if it knew of it - an interesting link with Evelyn Waugh, whose celebration of Oxford in Brideshead Revisited remains one of the most potent, if misleading, pictures of the city and university.
During Waugh’s misspent days as a prep-school master - after he left Oxford and before he made his name as a novelist with Decline and Fall - he was a regular patron of what was then the Nag’s Head. (He may, indeed, have been one while he was a student, although this is not recorded.) His diaries make three specific references to the place, which back in the 1920s, I suppose, was new (or old and awaiting demolition?).
The first is in an entry for September 15, 1924, in which he writes: “We spent the evening saying goodbye to everyone at the Nag’s Head.” The next day he is back, after a “disgusting” dinner at the George where, in order “to make things less disagreeable a friend had insisted on arranging with the waitress to lie with her after the meal”. He continues: “Even the pubs were not comforting because, since we had made so many farewells, we could hardly return to the Nag’s Head and were forced to go to the Paviours Arms actually Pavier’s, an old Oxford Times favourite in St Ebbe’s.”
Then, on November 12 of the same year he writes: “I went on to the Nag’s Head where I had arranged to meet Lord Elmley. Claud Cockburn turned up there with mad Yorke- Lodge and a beastly man in an eye glass, all very drunk. When we were turned out we went to see Mrs Heritage and then to the old Hypocrites’ rooms for the drinking of whisky … after about this stage of the evening my recollections become somewhat blurred.”
It would be good to think that today’s generation of undergraduates - who appear to be making a beeline for the sprauncily renovated place - are maintaining the same standards of fun. I rather doubt it, however.
After a somewhat dismal period (latterly at any rate) as the Antiquity Hall, the Oxford Retreat is now very much a place to see and be seen in following a smart revamp by its young owners Rachel and Stuart, who reopened it in November. They have the services of a charismatic manager in Andrew Webster (Webster’, as he likes to be called) and an excellent chef in Mark Harris. All are old muckers, I understand, from Marlborough - the town not the college.
I have so far patronised the pub three times: the first as a meeting place for a large group of friends before dinner at the nearby Sojo restaurant; the second for a t
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“[In A] Hugh Lygon’s name appears last in Evelyn’s list of fellow Hypocrites: ‘Hugh Lygon, Elmley’s younger brother, always just missing the happiness he sought, without ambition, unhappy in love, a man of greatest sweetness; and many others…’ The wistfulness and the drift into ellipses suggests that something is being left unsaid. Why was it, when Evelyn could be comparatively open about Hugh Pares and Alistair Graham? […]”
- Paula Byrne’s Mad World
- Paula Byrne’s Mad World
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“[Evelyn Waugh] planned to share lodgings with Hugh Lygon in Merton Street. They were going to take an expensive little house next to the tennis courts. [But Evelyn’s father chose not to send him to Oxford for another term.]”
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Paula Byrne’s Mad World
The weeks went by; we looked for lodgings for the coming term and found them in Merton Street, a secluded, expensive little house near the tennis court.
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“Everyone knew that Evelyn [Waugh] and Hugh Lygon had an affair.”
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Tamara Abelson (later Talbot Rice), a White Russian exile, who knew EW at Oxford where she was one of the rare undergraduettes.
[via Paula Byrne’s Mad World]
"[Hugh Lygon] drifted round Oxford like a lost boy, a Peter Pan who refused to grow up. Terrence..."
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“[Hugh Lygon] drifted round Oxford like a lost boy, a Peter Pan who refused to grow up. Terrence Greenidge remembered him carrying a teddy-bear.”
- Paula Byrne’s Mad World
- Paula Byrne’s Mad World
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“I see now what I have missed.”
- Henry Yorke to Evelyn Waugh, after reading Brideshead Revisited - about not having a homosexual love in Oxford himself.
- Henry Yorke to Evelyn Waugh, after reading Brideshead Revisited - about not having a homosexual love in Oxford himself.
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“Homosexuality was considered by many to be a passing phase, which young men would grow out of once they had left Oxford and begun to meet young women. In those days it was chic to be ‘queer’ in the same way as it was chic to have a taste for atonal music and Cubist painting. Even old Arthur Waugh acknoledged as much: ‘Alec called on me the other day with a new friend of his, a sodomite, but Alec tells me it is a coming thing.’”
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Paula Byrne’s Mad World
Yes, there are a lot more Byrne quotes coming - I did warn you when I started reading. :-)
суббота, 07 мая 2011
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“Elmley [Willian Lygon, Hugh’s brother] was something of a fish out of water. He had matruiculated at Magdalene, a college renowned for aristocratic breeding and sporting endeavour. But he disliked rowing and thought that hunting was cruel - a belief translated by Waugh into a trait of Sebastian Flyte;s older brother ‘Bridey’, who refuses to ride hounds.”
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Paula Byrne’s Mad World
Bridey, too, was in Magdalene. But did he ever say he disliked or even detested hunting?
"The change was not so apparent to them as to us, and they still congregated on occasions in our..."
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“The change was not so apparent to them as to us, and they still congregated on occasions in our rooms; but we gave up seeking them. Instead we formed the taste for lower company and spent our evenings, as often as not, in Hogarthian little inns in St. Ebb’s and St. Clement’s and the streets between the old market and the canal, where we managed to be gay and were, I believe, well liked by the company. The Gardener’s Arms and the Nag’s Head, the Druid’s Head near the theatre, and the Turf in Hell Passage knew us well; but in the last of these we were liable to meet other undergraduates— pub-crawling hearties from BNC - and Sebastian became possessed by a kind of phobia, like that which sometimes comes over men in uniform against their own service, so that many an evening was spoilt by their intrusion, and he would leave his glass half empty and turn sulkily back to college.”
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Byrne, however, mentions that
such [as the Hypocrites] clubs were necessary because undergraduates were banned from going into city’s pubs, for fear of town versus gown fistcuffs or liaisons with undesireable women.
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"…a very early effort of Waugh’s, a story called ‘Anthony, Who sought Things that were Lost’,..."
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“…a very early effort of Waugh’s, a story called ‘Anthony, Who sought Things that were Lost’, written as an undergraduate for Harold Acton’s avant-garde student magazine Oxford Broom, and never afterwards republished. ‘Anthony’ is a typical undergraduate effort, silly, sadistic, and modish only in one respect: it exploits the revival of interest in Elizabethan macabre made fashionable by Rupert Brooke’s pre-war study of Webster.”
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Although the story was never republished, we can find out a little about it in Paula Byrne’s Mad World:
[Evelyn Waugh] wrote a story for the third number [of Oxford Broom, the magazine edited by Harold Acton], which was published in June 1923. Entitled ‘Anthony, who sought things that were lost’, it concerns a beautiful young aristocrat, ‘born of a proud family’, who ‘seemed always to be seeking in the future for what had gone before’. He was perhaps the first fictional draft for the Sebastian type, created exactly at the time when Evelyn was beginning to be drawn to Hugh and his kind.
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A list of all written works by Evelyn Waugh:
It has certain misprints such as “My Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Sad Stories” instead of “Mr Loveday’s”.
"In Evelyn [Waugh]’s third term he changed to a more spacious set of rooms on the ground floor..."
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“In Evelyn [Waugh]’s third term he changed to a more spacious set of rooms on the ground floor of the front quad. this left him vulnerable to people dropping in to dump their bags or to cadge a drink and a cigarette. He decorated the rooms with Lovat Fraser prints and kept a human skull in a bowl, which he decorated with flowers. One night a group of ‘young bloods’ came into the quad drunk and looking for trouble. One of them leaned into Evelyn’s window and was violently sick.”
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Paula Byrne’s Mad World
At least three quotes come to mind, the first two of them involving cousin Jasper.
- …Finally, just as he was going, he said, “One last point. Change your rooms.” They were large, with deeply recessed windows and painted, eighteenth-century panelling; I was lucky as a freshman to get them. “I’ve seen many a man ruined through having ground-floor rooms in the front quad,” said my cousin with deep gravity. “People start dropping in. They leave their gowns here and come and collect them before hall; you start giving them sherry. Before you know where you are, you’ve opened a free bar for all the undesirables of the college.”
- …”Or that peculiarly noisome object?” (A human skull lately purchased from the School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the motto Et in Arcadia ego inscribed on its forehead.)
“Yes,” I said, glad to be clear of one charge. “I had to pay cash for the skull.” - It was shortly before midnight in early March; I had been entertaining the college intellectuals to mulled ,claret; the fire was roaring, the air of my room heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics. I threw open my windows and from the quad outside came the not uncommon sounds of bibulous laughter and unsteady steps. A voice said: “Hold up”; another, “Come on”; another, “Plenty of time . . . House . . . till Tom stops ringing”; and another, clearer than the rest, “D’you know I feel most unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute,” and there appeared at my window the face I knew to be Sebastian’s — but not as I had formerly seen it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick.
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Gay For Today :
Gay For Today celebrates the incredible variety, contribution and existence of gay men throughout our culture and recent history.
There are entries about Willian and Hugh Lygon, Brian Howard, Harold Acton, and, naturally, Stephen Tennant.
пятница, 06 мая 2011
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“A scrum of drunken hearties from the rowing club ducked Harold Acton in his pyjamas in the Mercury Fountain in Christ Church’s Tom Quad.”
- Paula Byrne, Mad World
- Paula Byrne, Mad World
"…and my earliest friends fitted well into this background; they were Collins, a Wykehamist,..."
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“…and my earliest friends fitted well into this background; they were Collins, a Wykehamist, an embryo don, a man of solid reading and childlike humour, and a small circle of college intellectuals, who maintained a middle course of culture between the flamboyant “aesthetes” and the proletarian scholars who scrambled fiercely for facts in the lodging houses of the Iffley-Road and Wellington Square.”
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In his letters Evelyn Waugh wrote that his friends of the first two terms were
a gloomy scholar from some Grammar school who talked nothing, some aristocratic men who talked winter sports and motor cars.
[via Paula Byrne’s Mad World]
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EncycloMundi - live feed: I'm falling for Nancy Mitford's charms:
writing about her good friend Evelyn Waugh:
I’m making such a lot of money with articles…so I’m saving it up to be married but Evelyn [Waugh] says don’t save it, dress better and catch a better man. Evelyn is always so full of sound common sense. The family have read Vile Bodies and I’m not allowed to know him, so right I think…
in a letter from Rutland Gate Mews, 30th March, 1930 as quoted in Nancy Mitford by Harold Acton.
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This is Princess X, perhaps the most shocking sculpture by Brancusi.
Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough…