contra mundum
“Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited shows that the novelists can be unpleasant too, with the rudeness of a schoolboy. His opening chapters are brilliantly puerile, with Sebastian Flyte and his friend Charles Ryder as snobbish undergraduates at Oxford in the golden 1920s. But for me the story descends to concern with Sebastian’s failure as a son in a wealthy Roman Catholic family and as a man, the breakdown of his character in alcoholism, decay, ultimate damnation.
It is the same problem that so gready disturbed E. M. Forster —the inability of England’s sons to grow up. Forster called it “the undeveloped heart.” The Times Literary Supplement calls it “a traditional English malady.” Cyril Connolly called it a Theory of Permanent Adolescence. In America we call it the Peter Pan “I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up” or Little Boy Blue syndrome, of those who remain schoolboys for life.
Sebastian clings to his nanny and his teddy bear, a lost child disposed of by Waugh.”
- The third and only way: reflections on staying alive
by Helen Smith Bevington
It is the same problem that so gready disturbed E. M. Forster —the inability of England’s sons to grow up. Forster called it “the undeveloped heart.” The Times Literary Supplement calls it “a traditional English malady.” Cyril Connolly called it a Theory of Permanent Adolescence. In America we call it the Peter Pan “I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up” or Little Boy Blue syndrome, of those who remain schoolboys for life.
Sebastian clings to his nanny and his teddy bear, a lost child disposed of by Waugh.”
- The third and only way: reflections on staying alive
by Helen Smith Bevington