A View of Wilcox

[Brideshead]

The Butler Did It: A View of Wilcox
by David Bittner

One of the favorite stock characters in English fiction and drama is the butler, giving rise to the catchphrase, “The butler did it.” With that in mind, it is high time to deal with that genial and faithful servant of the Flyte family, Wilcox, who was so beautifully acted by Roger Milner in the Granada Television production of Brideshead Revisited (1981).
There is no way of knowing for certain whether Wilcox was one of several Catholic servants introduced by Lady Marchmain, but he probably “prayed … among the Flyte tombs in the little grey church by the gates” (Waugh 85). Waugh says that “Plender was not an original member of the Brideshead household,” the implication being that Wilcox was (312). Wilcox may have been one of Lady Marchmain’s Catholic servants or part of Lord Marchmain’s retinue before he married Lady Marchmain. After Lord Marchmain deserted his wife to live in sin with Cara in Venice, Wilcox stayed on with Lady Marchmain.
Wilcox seems to have a soft spot for Julia, perhaps most of all of the family. Sebastian suggests as much when he says to his sister, “Julia, do you think if you asked him, Wilcox would give us champagne to-night?” (77). Wilcox trudges up the staircase to bring Julia bread and milk when she is hungry and delivers messages to her. At various times, Wilcox informs Julia that he has shown Rex Mottram into the library, where he is waiting for her, that Bridey will be late for dinner and says not to wait for him, and that Lady Cordelia has just arrived in London (after serving for years as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War) and will arrive at Brideshead Castle after dinner. “Wilcox, how lovely!” exclaims Julia in a tender moment (300).
Wilcox welcomes Charles and Sebastian’s interest in wine, expressing concern over the way Bridey and Lord and Lady Marchmain avoid ensuring the estate’s supply of wine beyond another ten years
(83). Alcohol is an important part of English households, and Wilcox takes this part of his job seriously. He also acts in concert with Lady Marchmain to make sure Sebastian is not given the chance to indulge his excessive appetite for liquor. Wilcox exchanges glances with Lady Marchmain when Sebastian asks for whiskey at dinner, correctly interpreting her “tiny, hardly perceptible nod” of permission, and places a decanter that is only half-full in front of Sebastian (155). Upon her instructions, he hides the keys to the liquor cabinet from Sebastian, but Cordelia conveys whiskey to her brother. Cordelia tells Charles in a letter that there was an “awful row” and that she is “in disgrace” (170). Wilcox is a good and discreet servant, who knows his place in the household, carefully exercises his judgment, and shows sincere concern for the Flytes.
Upon the master’s return to Brideshead, Wilcox treats Lord Marchmain solicitously. He also cheerfully shares his duties with Plender, Lord Marchmain’s valet. The two men fortunately take “a liking to one another” (313), as becomes clear in their cooperation in setting up the Queen’s bed in the Chinese drawing room. Plender asks about the room; Lord Marchmain specifies the Chinese drawing room but then tells Wilcox about the Queen’s bed (315). Lord Marchmain, in his wisdom, shows some consideration for his two faithful servants by involving both of them. Similarly, Lord Marchmain instructs Wilcox to put the silver basin and ewer that stood in the Cardinal’s drawing room in the Chinese drawing room and then to send Plender and Gaston to him (318).
Wilcox ends up in a retirement home in Melstead, but he visits Nanny twice a month at Brideshead, and Nanny observes that “Mr. Wilcox never liked Mr. Mottram’s friends” (349). Rex and his “curious accomplices” (199), as Julia once called them, have tried to make Hitler “feel very small,” and Nanny suggests that the household was “entertaining angels unawares” (349). Although Wilcox told Nanny about his distaste for Rex, he judiciously told few, if any, others. In the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, there is an added scene of Rex arriving at Brideshead to see Julia and politely inquiring after Wilcox’s health. Wilcox just as politely thanks Rex.
Roger Milner is not only an actor but also a writer of screenplays, including the television specials Across the Lake (1988), Amy (1984), and The Queen’s Guards (1961). His many other dramatic roles include the Vicar in A Handful of Dust (1988) as well as appearances in Middlemarch (1994) and Dombey and Son (1983).
Nigel Rees, in Sayings of the Century (1984), quotes a correspondent who recalls hearing “The butler did it” at a cinema house circa 1916 but says the origin of the phrase has never been traced beyond this (45).

Works Cited
Rees, Nigel. Sayings of the Century. London: Allen and Unwin, 1984.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945.

Editor’s Note: David Bittner published an interview entitled “After Brideshead Revisited: Charles Ryder Turns 102” in the Nassau Review 9.1 (2005): 95-7.

@темы: mini-series, films, servants, wilcox

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Bacchus, Beelzebub and “the Botanical Gardens”

[Brideshead]

Brideshead Revista’d: Bacchus, Beelzebub and “the Botanical Gardens”
by Simon Whitechapel

A fractal repeats its characteristic pattern on endlessly deeper levels. The pattern may be very simple or very complex, and though to call Evelyn Waugh a “fractal novelist” in the latter sense is presently no more than a sophomoric conceit, there are undoubtedly genuine mathematical patterns to be uncovered in his work by future researchers.
These researchers may discover that the “fractal” of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) repeats its pattern of meaning at deeper and deeper levels, and that the superficial level is contradicted by the deeper, and the deeper by the deeper still. To see one possible example, seize and tug the thread of Sebastian’s Oxonian “ivy.” After his first full meeting with the Protestant Charles Ryder, the Catholic Sebastian Flyte announces:

“I must go to the Botanical Gardens.”
“Why?”
“To see the ivy.”
It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.
“I’ve never been to the Botanical Gardens,” I said.
“Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There’s a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don’t know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.”[1]

What is the meaning of the ivy? It seems an obvious symbol of Sebastian’s love of nature, but may also represent his flight into hedonistic paganism: it is closely associated with Bacchus, god of wine and revelry, who wore a wreath of ivy and bound his enmaddening wand, or thyrsos, with ivy and vine. Bacchus is often portrayed as hermaphroditic,[2] and Waugh later describes how Sebastian’s beauty has foreshadowed that of his sister Julia: “She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and strangeness.”[3] And so Charles’s visit to the Botanical Gardens and its ivy may represent his initiation into the cult of hermaphroditic Bacchus and his break with his previous life and tastes.
After the visit, Charles describes how, “When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.”[4] The screen is “painted” with “a Proven

@темы: motifs

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Orphans of the Storm

[Brideshead]

“Orphans of the Storm” in Brideshead Revisited
by John Howard Wilson
Lock Haven University

In Brideshead Revisited (1945), during the storm at sea, when almost all the other passengers are seasick, Julia asks, “where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?” (Little, Brown, 261). The last phrase seems like a clich

@темы: julia, motifs

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Bubbles

[Brideshead]

What of Bubbles?
by David Bittner

In Brideshead Revisited, Anthony Blanche tells Charles Ryder, at the restaurant in Thame, that Sebastian Flyte’s conversation is so superficial that it is forgettable: “Tell me, candidly,” Anthony asks Charles, as he “devilishly” tries in one of numerous ways to turn Charles against Sebastian (and perhaps thus to steal Charles from Sebastian), “have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have remembered for five minutes?” He continues:

You know, when I hear him talk, I am reminded of that in some ways nauseating picture of ‘Bubbles.’ Conversation, as I know it, is like juggling; up go the balls and the balloons and the plates, up and over, in and out, spinning and leaping, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soap-suds drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a moment and then—phut—vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.
(Little, Brown, 56-7)

What exactly was this picture, Bubbles, that reminded Anthony of Sebastian, and what does Anthony find nauseating about it? It was painted by the English portrait and historical artist Sir John Everett Millais, who flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to an article on the Internet, Millais was very popular in his day but has been criticized since for his “sickly sweet” portraits of children. Millais painted Bubbles in 1886, using his grandson, William James, as his model, and giving his old pipe to William to blow soap bubbles with. Frances Hodgson Burnett had just published her very successful novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy, about a poor little rich boy, whose grandfather, an English earl, has disinherited his son because he married an American. The popularity of the book on both sides of the Atlantic surely explains why Millais painted his grandson in a velvet suit with a lace collar and cuff, and ringlet curls, just like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Perhaps in the painting’s subject, Anthony saw a reflection of himself, thwarted and pitiable.
Bubbles became notorious when it was acquired by the Pears soap company for advertising purposes. Subsequently the picture was reproduced on dishes, candy boxes, and countless other commercial objects in England, which also explains why Anthony got sick of it. The ubiquity of Bubbles may have reminded Anthony of Sebastian’s “seeming to be everywhere,” or at least with Charles and Anthony that night at Thame. If Anthony’s association of Bubbles with Sebastian caused him to feel “sick,” maybe he was partly sick with jealousy. In the novel it is clearly suggested that Anthony is jealous not only of Sebastian’s looks, pedigree, and wealth, but also of his popularity wherever he goes. At Eton, Sebastian “never got into trouble” with the masters, whereas Anthony and the rest of the boys were “constantly being beaten in the most savage way on the most frivolous pretexts” (51). And you can bet that at Oxford Sebastian never got put in Mercury! Even Edward Ryder, Charles’s puckish father, likes Sebastian because he is “very amusing,” and he tells Charles to “ask him often” (128).
Bubbles continued to be associated with its subject, William James, throughout his long life. In fact, to James’s chagrin, “Bubbles” became his nickname. For a career officer in the Royal Navy, who rose to the rank of admiral and received the G.C.B., K.C.B., and C.B., the association may not have been nauseating, but one can imagine that it became tiresome. Admiral James wrote some ten books on naval life and history and died in 1973 at the age of 92.

@темы: blanche, motifs

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"Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be […] while holding untenable opinions."

[Brideshead]

“Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be […] while holding untenable opinions.”

- George Orwell on Brideshead Revisited

@темы: quote

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Brideshead Remodernized

[Brideshead]

Brideshead Remodernized
by Jonathan Pitcher
University College London

“I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.”
I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.
—Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited (154)

In the case of the past it is harder for us to get the shock … . Everything that is strange can be interpreted in a familiar way, or at least ignored.
—C. J. F. Martin in An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy (13)

Even the briefest of glimpses at any recent bibliography’s suggested list of secondary texts regarding Brideshead indicates just how belabored our postmodern n

@темы: books, fairies

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Nanny Hawkins

[Brideshead]

Nanny Hawkins and the Servant Problem
by David Bittner

The character of Nanny Hawkins in Brideshead Revisited has seldom been dealt with, and I, for one, think it is high time that she be debunked. It is my belief that she belongs to the dubious tradition of ineffectual servants exemplified by Juliet Capulet’s Nurse. Both women are rather effete characters, more concerned about pleasing themselves than being truly useful. The difference between the two is that Nanny’s days of authority are behind her, while Juliet’s Nurse continues to exert her influence. The Boots’ servants in Scoop, who wait upon the family in “desultory fashion,” may be a source for Nanny.
That Nanny is really rather detached from the Flyte siblings is made quite clear by Waugh. He says, following Sebastian’s return from his Levantine jaunt, “Nanny did not particularly like to be talked to. She liked visitors best when they paid no attention to her and let her knit away, and watch their faces and think of them as she had known them as small children; their present goings-on did not signify much beside those early illnesses and crimes.” When Charles and Julia inform Nanny about their plans to marry, it does not occur to her to “question the propriety” of the match. In the PBS presentation of Brideshead Revisited, when Julia plays halma with Nanny, Sebastian says, “Dear Nanny Hawkins. She lives entirely for pleasure.” It is a measure of Nanny’s detachment from the real activities of the Flytes that she believes the upper classes spend most of their leisure evenings in the ballroom.
Juliet’s Nurse is just as inert as Nanny but shows no sign of fading into the background as she ages. Mark van Doren says of the Nurse that she takes a “prurient interest in love-business, the details of which she mumbles toothlessly, reminiscently, with the indecency of age.” He adds that the Nurse’s delight in reminiscence is, among other things, “lickerish.”
The Twayne series’ book on Romeo and Juliet, by Cedric Watts, is scarcely more admiring of the Nurse. Watts says, “Her idiom, tending so often toward the vulgarly colloquial, makes clear her social class. She uses credibly habitual forms of endearment to Juliet and takes a partly prurient pride in Juliet’s eligibility for marriage.” Watts adds that when the Nurse urges Juliet to accept Paris as her husband, “her practical cynicism becomes overt.”
Watts’s point about the colloquial quality of the Nurse’s speech has its counterpart in Waugh’s description of Nanny’s speech in her old age, “formerly sharpened by years of gentle conversation,” but “reverted now to the soft, peasant tones of its origin.” And Nanny, like the Nurse, is more concerned about herself than about making a difference in the household she serves, the way Scarlett O’Hara’s Mammy and Mr. B’s Hazel and Miss Daisy’s Hoke all do. As Waugh writes, “the changes of the last years had come too late in [Nanny’s] life to be accepted and understood.” All Nanny can say in regard to the blitzed Lady Brideshead’s misfortune, for instance, is “It doesn’t seem right.”
But let’s be fair. If good help is hard to find, it is probably also true, as Montaigne said, that “few men are admired of their familiars.”

@темы: nanny, servants

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Something So Different

[Brideshead]

Something So Different by Kathryn S. Easter

The literary gamut usually runs from the sublime to the ridiculous, but Evelyn Waugh developed in quite the reverse direction: from the ridiculous to the sublime. Between his first novel and his last, Waugh clearly went through a profound paradigm shift easily detected in his themes. The startling change recalls Monty Python’s stock transitional phrase, “and now for something completely different.” Waugh’s view of the world was completely different by the time he wrote his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, for a singular reason: he had become a Roman Catholic.

[…]

Fast-forward sixteen years past publication of Decline and Fall. Waugh has converted, having become a devout Roman Catholic. His magnum opus is written, and it radiates with Waugh’s religious convictions. Whereas he had prefaced Decline and Fall with the warning that it was “meant to be funny,” this time he stated boldly, “Brideshead Revisited is not meant to be funny.” He added that there are passages of buffoonery, but “the general theme is at once romantic and eschatological” (Stannard 236).

[…]

After publication of Brideshead Revisited in America, a Mr. McClose wrote to Waugh: “Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything. Seems more like the kiss of Death to me” (Stannard 260). By the novel’s end, the lovers are forced apart by a sense of sin; the house is deserted; the family is scattered; the only child that is born is dead. Mr. McClose is right, Catholicism is a kiss of Death—one absolutely necessary for salvation; it is death to worldliness, selfishness, carnal baseness. Death in this case is not tragic as the world understands tragedy, but comedic as Christianity understands comedy. This commedia of Dante “enters drama with the miracle-play cycles, where such tragedies as the Fall and the Crucifixion are episodes of a dramatic scheme in which the divine comedy has the last word,” Frye explains, and that last word is of course Resurrection: “The sense of tragedy as a prelude to comedy is hardly separable from anything explicitly Christian” (84). Brideshead is not only Christian; it is also explicitly Catholic.
The distinction between Christianity and Roman Catholicism is important, mostly because many Protestant sects lack a developed theology regarding “death of self”—especially as it involves pain and suffering. Catholics know that their religion is extremely difficult (impossible, in fact, without the help of God’s grace), and this difficulty becomes the theme of Brideshead Revisited.

Throughout Brideshead Revisited, the difference of Catholicism is not as funny as it is profound; this profundity exasperates Charles, the “poor agnostic,” as Cordelia calls him. When he and the family discuss Sebastian’s downward spiral into alcoholism, Bridey says, “I believe God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people.” Charles cries out, “For God’s sake, […] why bring God into everything?” (BR 145). Later, Bridey makes a similar comment: “There’s nothing wrong with being a physical wreck, you know.” He also mentions a “moral obligation,” and in frustration, Charles tells Bridey that he manages to “reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense” (BR 164). But Bridey is quite right in terms of Catholic piety. Drunkards and physical wrecks are more acutely aware of their weakness and dependence on God than are those who go from one shallow comfort to the next.
Cordelia supports Bridey’s offhand remarks when Charles asks her, “How will it end?” She responds, “I’ve seen others like [Sebastian], and I believe they are very near and dear to God” (BR 308). She goes on to describe his daily struggles; Charles says, “I suppose he doesn’t suffer?” “Oh yes, I think he does,” Cordelia replies. “One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is—no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering” (BR 309). This is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity: suffering leads to holiness, holiness to eternal happiness.
Eternal happiness, not earthly happiness, is a key point in Brideshead Revisited. The Marchmain family experiences this theological crux in different ways, as Sebastian explains to Charles:

“So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated—and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want.… I wish I liked Catholics more” (BR 89).

As his drinking increases, Sebastian joins the unhappy. His mother notices that when Sebastian is drunk, there is “nothing happy about him” (BR 136). Charles becomes increasingly distraught at the sorry situation. He tells Bridey, “without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and a healthy man.” Bridey nonchalantly replies, “It’s arguable” (BR 145). Bridey’s matter-of-fact Catholicism is endlessly frustrating. Bridey knows that health and happiness are unnecessary for holiness, which is why he is content to be “miserable,” as Sebastian observes.
Charles shares more of his thoughts about the Flytes’ Catholicism when he speaks about Julia, Sebastian’s “half-heathen” counterpart. Wherever she turns, “her religion [stands] as a barrier between herself and her natural goal” (BR 181). The goal that Charles speaks of is carnal, unholy—adultery followed by divorce. As a Catholic, Julia is called not to a “natural goal” but to a supernatural one, which requires death to her passions, her desires, her self.
Charles explains Julia’s troublesome situation: “If she apostasized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, [and] live at peace with their world” (BR 181-2). “Happy ignorance” may seem like a better way to spend one’s life, but it is not the Catholic way. Because she has been brought up a Roman Catholic, Julia is not ignorant of the necessity of suffering, and she has a tremendous responsibility for the well-being of her own soul.
The greatest saints of the Church knew that they must suffer for the love of God and embraced their trials wholeheartedly. They were even given the grace to transform their suffering into happiness. The two half-heathen Marchmain children and their excommunicated father resist this lofty idea in Brideshead Revisited. Charles tells Lady Marchmain that Sebastian is “ashamed of being unhappy.” He has become just like his father: unhappy, ashamed, running away. Lady Marchmain concludes, “It’s too pitiful” (BR 136-7). The attitude of the matriarch drives her son and her husband away. Her pity is also God’s; it is God’s mercy. Cordelia explains: “I sometimes think that when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy. […] she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that” (BR 221).
Lady Marchmain is perhaps the most complicated character in the entire book. A reader once asked Waugh, “Are you or are you not on Lady Marchmain’s side? I couldn’t make out.” He responded, “No, I am not on her side, but God is, who suffers fools gladly” (Beaty 161). She gives the Church to her family, though she also drives most of them away. Destructive as her behavior may be, it is not sinful. Lady Marchmain is as compulsive as her son, maimed like Sebastian, but less holy. Sebastian is loveable; bound to the stake of his suffering—of his compulsions—he becomes saintly, like the martyr after whom he is named. Lady Marchmain suffers too (in fact, Sebastian even relates her to an oleograph of the Seven Dolours), but she is not a saint, not loveable, not even adequately loving towards anyone other than God. She is, however, ultimately more fruitful than her son, for she is the primary vehicle of Catholicism in the novel. “The book,” wrote Waugh, “is about God,” and Lady Marchmain acts as His instrument despite her great and perhaps insuperable difficulty seeing His Son in His creatures (Myers 76).
Lady Marchmain has somehow allowed the world to be too much with her—fallen secularity has infiltrated her sacred abode, and scandal after scandal (beginning with Lord Marchmain’s adultery and ending with Julia’s) has scarred the family’s honor. She is nearly incapable of loving the un-Christ-like—she does not adhere to the Lord’s words in Scripture, “And if you love them that love you, what thanks are to you? For sinners also love those that love them” (Luke 6:32). Furthermore, she, her middle children, and her estranged husband do not transcend their self-loathing to lead truly pious lives. The latter three cannot love Lady Marchmain, since she acts as a constant reminder of the way they ought to be living, in spite of their disordered attachments to the world. Julia, Sebastian, and Lord Marchmain flee from their painfully difficult Catholic duty into shallow pleasures. While these orphans run amuck, the agnostic outside the fold is drawn in. Charles falls in love with the Marchmain family. He is enchanted by Sebastian, enamored with Julia, charmed by Lady Marchmain, and moved by the experience of being at their home: “I […] believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead” (BR 79). Charles says of Sebastian, “He was the forerunner,” and Julia replies: “That’s what you said in the storm. I’ve thought since: perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.” Charles reflects that

all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us. (BR 303)

Because man is made in the image of God, love of any person is a forerunner of the ultimate love of God. Such is the drama of life—perseverance day in and day out through disappointment and sadness—all stemming from separation from the Creator.
It is a tragicomic war in Lord Marchmain’s soul as he lies quietly dying. Charles looks at this man in bed—slowly breathing, slowly fading—and the poor agnostic fights against the imposition of the Last Rites. In great distress, he asks Julia, “Can’t they even let him die in peace?” Julia responds, “They mean something so different by ‘peace’” (BR 324). Something entirely different, indeed: finite war with self on earth before infinite peace with God in Heaven. Lord Marchmain must smite his stubborn pride and give in to Christ’s mercy. Charles imagines that “All over the world people were on their knees before innumerable crosses, and here the drama was being played again by two men—by one man, rather, and he nearer death than life; the universal drama in which there is only one actor” (BR 338).
Brideshead Revisited is a lush tapestry of drama; it is comedy and tragedy splendidly juxtaposed. Many readers who did not like this book did not recognize this juxtaposition. When observed with spirit and supernatural awareness, religion automatically blends the comic and the tragic. Any religious view will see absurdities, paradoxes, and simple humor adjacent to the most serious truths. When Julia rants in pain at the realization that she is “living in sin,” Charles says to her, “It’s like the setting of a comedy.” Julia is startled by Charles’s choice of the word “comedy.” He answers, “Drama. Tragedy. Farce. What you will. This is the reconciliation scene” (BR 291). How perfectly right he is; Julia is finally being reconciled with herself, her faith, her God. She has died in the same way that Paul Pennyfeather died in Decline and Fall, and like him, Julia is on the brink of resurrection.
After watching her father’s surrender to the love of Christ at his death, Julia knows that she cannot go on living in sin with Charles; instead, she must follow her father’s example. At first, Charles is hurt and angry; he says to his lover, “I hope your heart may break” (BR 341). In the story’s epilogue, Charles is a different man altogether, a Roman Catholic. No longer is he sad and grim, poor and thwarted. He prays before the tabernacle in the house that was his heaven and is at long last “cheerful” (BR 351). He has accomplished what the saints have all accomplished: happiness through suffering. This is the work of the Divine Purpose which drives Waugh’s novel. As God’s Providence led a poor agnostic to supernatural reality through his love for a Catholic family, so too it may be God’s Providence that has led countless readers to the same supernatural reality through their love for this profoundly Catholic story.

@темы: religion

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Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies

[Brideshead]

Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies

@темы: links, waugh

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Review Analysis of Brideshead Revisited

[Brideshead]

Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot
Tone of book? - thoughtful
Time/era of story - 1930’s-1950’s
Romance/Romance Problems Yes
Internal struggle/realization? Yes
Struggle over - religious issues
Is this an adult or child’s book? - Adult or Young Adult Book
War/Revolt/Disaster on civilians Yes
Love problems? - gay guy urges
Conflict: - War, general - War, WW II

Main Character
Gender - Male
Profession/status: - artist
Age: - 20’s-30’s
Ethnicity/Nationality - British
How sensitive is this character? - sensitive to others’ feelings
Sense of humor - Strong but gentle sense of humor
Intelligence - Smarter than most other characters
Physique - average physique

Main Adversary
Identity: - Male
Age: - 20’s-30’s
Profession/status: - student
Eccentric/Smart/Dumb: Yes
Eccentric: - wild - eccentric
How much of work is main antagonist actually present in: - almost none
How sensitive is this character? - mean, arrogant
Sense of humor - Cynical sense of humor
Intelligence - Smarter than most other characters
Physique - average physique

Setting
How much descriptions of surroundings? - 5 ()
Europe Yes
European country: - England/UK - Italy
Water? Yes
Water: - pleasure/love boat
Misc setting - fancy mansion

Style
Person - mostly 1st
Accounts of torture and death? - generic/vague references to death/punishment
Unusual Style: - a lot of flashback and forwards
Amount of dialog - roughly even amounts of descript and dialog

One’s mind boggles, really.

@темы: books, press, review

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Auberon Waugh @ wikiThe Waugh newsletter issue about AuberonAlexander Waugh @ wikiBrideshead...

[Brideshead]

Auberon Waugh @ wiki
The Waugh newsletter issue about Auberon
Alexander Waugh @ wiki
Brideshead Benighted by Auberon Waugh.

Satirical essays discuss life in modern Britain, including royalty, the working classes, politics, education, the press, religion, drugs, and law and order.

@темы: books, waugh

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Book 2, Chapter 2

[Brideshead]

‘Only one, darling.’
With the relatively small numbers of Catholics in the country, England has traditionally had only one Cardinal, the Archbishop of Westminster. In this period the Cardinal-Archbishop was Francis Bourne (1861-1935), who had been appointed archbishop in 1903 and was to occupy the position for 31 years.

instructed
All converts to the Catholic faith in modern times go through a lengthy process of familiarisation, often at the hands of priests experienced in guiding prospective members. The process has been regularised since 1924, but even then was extensive.

Clovis’s army
Julia is referring to the story of the conversion of Clovis I (c. 466-511, King of the Salian Franks from 481) as told by Saint Gregory of Tours. In brief, he was losing a battle with the Alemanni (Germans) in 496 when he remembered his Christian wife Saint Clotilda’s advice and prayed to God for help, and went on to win the battle. He was not satisfied with just his own conversion, however, and went on to proclaim the new God with considerable force to his army and all the people. Three thousand soldiers were baptised in one day. Julia rightly thinks that many of them must have done this from a sense of duty rather than through religious impulse.

plenary indulgences
A contentious issue throughout the last 500 years, plenary indulgences were (and still are) full remissions of punishment due to sin, attached by the Catholic Church to devout actions. They seem to have arisen as a means of associating the entire faithful with the supreme holy works of the Crusaders in the Holy Land in the Middle Ages (unholy as they proved to be), and many of them had the advantage of also raising money for holy purposes. This latter aspect was abolished by the Council of Trent, unfortunately long after Luther had initially inspired the Reformation by his resistance to the practice.

Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell
known collectively in the Catholic world as the Four Last Things. They would have formed the basis for a course of uncomfortable meditations in Julia’s childhood.

I can stop that, too
Lady Marchmain’s relentlessness is interesting. She is however right to say she could have stopped the marriage taking place in a Protestant church; though Catholics and Anglicans were not close, there was a sort of solidarity in the upper classes which would have operated in this situation. Low-church Protestants might not willingly have done her bidding, but at this time most of them were as much against divorce as the Catholics were.

(Cliffe)

@темы: religion

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Black-Birds the musical Florence Mills (January 25, 1896 -...

[Brideshead]

Black-Birds the musical

Florence Mills (January 25, 1896 - November 1, 1927).

@темы: music, motifs

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Aristocracy

[Brideshead]

Lord Sebastian Flyte

as the Marquess’s second son, Sebastian is formally titled Lord Sebastian Flyte. If he had later had a son the boy would have been a commoner and would not succeed to a lordship. In this way the British aristocracy kept itself small in numbers, a characteristic not found in most of the rest of Europe, where all sons had titles and often rights of inheritance. Thus British aristocrats retained large estates while many continental ones were reduced over time to owning nearly nothing. (NB later Lord Marchmain will bequeath the whole Brideshead estate to Julia. His sons could not even by legal action prevent him from doing this.)
The most notable person to demonstrate this jettisoning effect at the time of writing is the Queen’s grandson, Mr Peter Phillips, who is a commoner though his mother is the Princess Royal and he is tenth in line of succession to the Crown.

Marquis of Marchmain

A marquess is second in rank only to a duke in lay precedence in the House of Lords. It ranks above earl, viscount, baron and all other inherited titles outside the royal family. In general speech he would be called ‘Lord Marchmain’.
It is notable that EW did not choose to spell the title Marquess. In a letter to Anthony Powell (31st May 1956) he gave as his justification the fact that Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India and nearly Prime Minister, had preferred Marquis. Nearly all others of that rank, however, prefer Marquess, the exceptions being Scottish marquises whose titles were created before the Union with England (1707).

Earl of Brideshead

A peer’s eldest son is entitled to take his father’s second title as a courtesy while his father is alive. It must rank below that of his father. Likewise, the peer’s third title, lower ranking still, can be taken by his eldest son’s first son.

(Cliffe)

By the way, if you were wondering about Bridey’s title, you should know that he’s not actually the Earl of Brideshead (until his father dies). That title belongs to the Marquess of Marchmain. Bridey’s merely called the Earl of Brideshead; it’s known as a “courtesy title”, something that the eldest sons of dukes, marquesses and earls get.

(LJ comm)

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As for Charles:

a three-course dinner was middle-class

The middle class meal would have been soup, meat and sweet. The Ryders are of course eating a four-course meal, plus (no doubt) a post-prandial drink and (possibly but not certainly) coffee. Mr Ryder goes on to explain the format. A concern with not appearing middle-class is in itself not a certain indicator of the Ryders being aristocratic, but they are certainly from a landed family.

(Cliffe)

@темы: charles, sebastian, aristocracy, lord marchmain

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Inigo Jones Wilton House, Wiltshire

[Brideshead]

Inigo Jones

Wilton House, Wiltshire

@темы: brideshead

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Charles' house in London

[Brideshead]

Bayswater on Google maps
Wikipedia

@темы: charles, geography

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Château Peyraguey

[Brideshead]

Château Peyraguey
Two châteaux in Sauternes bear this name, Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey and Château Clos Haut-Peyraguey; both produce a superb white wine, generally but foolishly considered a dessert wine. Until 1879 the two châteaux were one, but then a family quarrel divided them. Clos Haut is sometimes known simply as Château Peyraguey, but we know from his Diary that EW drank 1924 Lafaurie-Peyraguey on 19th November 1937 - ‘Delicious wine’ he commented. After a period in the twentieth century when the wines produced were relatively unimpressive, connoisseurs today generally prefer Lafaurie to Clos Haut, but both retain the premier cru classification awarded to the united domain in 1855.
It is conceivable that Sebastian has brought along a true Château Peyraguey, i.e. one made before the split in 1879. (We learn later that there are plenty of old wines at Brideshead that need drinking up - on page 81 we read that there are vintages that are fifty years old.) It could even be pre-phylloxera wine, since French vineyards were slow to combat the invasion of this devastating pest. The Peyraguey that Sebastian and Charles drink would have aged nobly and would probably not be past its best.

(Cliffe)
Château Lafaurie-Peyraguey
Château Clos Haut-Peyraguey

@темы: wine, motifs

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Et in Arcadia ego

[Brideshead]

Et in Arcadia ego
‘I too am in Arcadia’ (Latin). Arcadia was celebrated in ancient times (by the Roman poet Virgil, among others) as a rural paradise where one could find innocence and true understanding. This meaning persisted throughout western civilisation until modern times. The original Arcadia was a central area of the Peloponnese in Greece. It is actually a mountainous and dangerous region but a people who exhibited generosity, simplicity and contentedness supposedly inhabited it in ancient times. The point of the motto Et in Arcadia ego is that Death is speaking it. Even in the happiest times, Death is saying, decay and disaster are not far away. It seems that the phrase dates back to the early Renaissance (the fifteenth century) as it has not been traced any earlier; but it had a lively existence in many paintings and writings of that period. Perhaps the motto’s most celebrated appearance is in a painting of 1655 by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), where various puzzled Arcadian characters are tracing the barely-visible words on a tomb. Poussin had earlier (1627) painted an even more explicit version of the theme in which a skull can just be seen on the tomb. An earlier painting still (1622), and attributed to Giovanni Francesco Barbieri known as Il Guercino (1591-1666), shows two shepherds looking at a skull on a stone pedestal on which the words are inscribed. Charles soon comes to possess such a skull or memento mori - what his cousin Jasper calls a ‘peculiarly noisome object’. It has the motto inscribed on its forehead.

(Cliffe)

Not so much of a Paradise, as it happens.

@темы: motifs

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Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh 'had three homosexual lovers at Oxford'

[Brideshead]

Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh 'had three homosexual lovers at Oxford'

@темы: press

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Sex scandal behind Brideshead Revisited

[Brideshead]

Sex scandal behind Brideshead Revisited:

Aristocrats, footmen, frightened king and curious writer. A new book uncovers the sex scandal behind Evelyn Waugh novel

@темы: press