Brideshead Revisited / Evelyn Waugh

[Jason Cardona]

Any other fans of Brideshead Revisited / Evelyn Waugh? Brideshead Revisited is probably my favorite novel. The story and theme of the book are very meaningful to me. I want to read more Waugh. I've read "The Loved One" as well. Still haven't seen the famous television version of Brideshead Revisited, though. I saw the movie they made a few years ago and hated it...don't remember exactly why, I think it was because they turned the novel into a love story and missed the whole point that it's about God's grace acting in the world.


We saw few strangers. There was the agent, a lean and pouchy colonel, who crossed our path occasionally and once came to tea. Usually we managed to hide from him. On Sundays a monk was fetched from a neighbouring monastery to say mass and breakfast with us. He was the first priest I ever met; I noticed how unlike he was to a parson, but Brideshead was a place of such enchantment to me that I expected everything and everyone to be unique; Father Phipps was in fact a bland, bun-faced man with an interest in county cricket which he obstinately believed us to share. ‘You, know, father, Charles and I simply don’t know about cricket.’ ‘I wish I’d seen Tennyson make that fifty-eight last Thursday. That must have been an innings. The account in The Times was excellent. Did you see him against the South Africans?’

‘I’ve never seen him.’

‘Neither have I. I haven’t seen a first-class match for years not since Father Graves took me when we were passing through Leeds, after we’d been to the induction of the Abbot at Ampleforth. Father Graves managed to look up a train which gave us three hours to wait on the afternoon of the match against Lancashire. That was an afternoon. I remember every ball of it. Since then I’ve had to go by the papers. You seldom go to see cricket?’

‘Never,’ I said, and he looked at me with the expression I have seen since in the religious, of innocent wonder that those who expose themselves to the dangers of the world should avail themselves so little of its varied solace.

[hawthorns]

Huge fan of Waugh. If you have not yet seen the original with Jeremy Irons, you're in for the treat of your life. Many (including me) believe it's maybe the best adaptation ever done--take a look at the amazon reviews. The story got a little depressing in the latter stages, but that's just my personal sentiment talking. I'm tempted to read it again

While the whole thing is on youtube, I'd recommend you purchase this immediately:

Best money you'll ever spend

http://www.amazon.com/Brideshead-Revisited-Anniversary-Collectors-Edition/dp/B000GYI3DG/ref=sr_1_5?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1333133922&sr=1-5


My favorite scene: (5:20--6:20)
The way music, memory, military backdrop, and impending tragedy converge is fantastic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1S3LBDT3vk&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL512090F8A7A9DBAA

Nickolas Grace was amazing as Anthony Blanche:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P6W7txlEtA&feature=related

[Jason Cardona]

Nickolas Grace was amazing as Anthony Blanche:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P6W7txlEtA&feature=related
I find his character diabolical in the novel. And I mean diabolical literally...I get the sense that Waugh uses him as a sort of devilish tempter; not innocently decadent like Charles or Sebastian, but more sinister.

Really want to see the movie.

[Calidore]

How is Waugh pronounced?

[Jason Cardona]

How is Waugh pronounced?
Like saw but with a W.

[KCurtis]

Definately see the version with Jeremy Irons, it was fantastic!! I have not read the book, maybe I will put it on my future list. It's nice to have a Bostonian on the forum!! My husband is one.

[hawthorns]

I find his character diabolical in the novel. And I mean diabolical literally...I get the sense that Waugh uses him as a sort of devilish tempter; not innocently decadent like Charles or Sebastian, but more sinister.

Really want to see the movie.

That was my initial impression of him too, especially after his early attempts to cozen Charles into abandoning Sebastian. However, the more character analysis I read the more I'm convinced he was--although not strictly 'honorable'--a well-intentioned literature tool employed to foreshadow later events and their symbolic significance. Anthony’s comments about the Flytes turn out to be true, Julia is admittedly a semi-heathen like her brother, the history regarding Lord and Lady Marchmain’s marriage is confirmed, and Charles concludes that Lady Marchmain is as manipulative as Anthony said. In fact, to me she came off as more diabolical and cold-hearted than anyone else (but it's been a while since I read it). Furthermore, Anthony's subtle warnings about how "charm" might impact Charles' art manifests itself in the form of a somewhat disastrous first showing. Finally, at the end Lord Marchmain asks him if he is to be an artist, at which time Charles' separation from both art and that effete life are complete.

[Veho]

Brideshead Revisited is fabulous. I've also read Waugh's Decline and Fall; it certainly doesn't have the depth and impact of the former but it's funny.

[Prince Smiles]

Ah, Evelyn Waugh, one the great Edwardian novelists.

This is how I would approach his works, and I don’t expect anyone to follow my advice:

Start with the Sword of Honour trilogy, then Brideshead, then Decline and Fall, then anything else your can lay you mitts on by him.

Then jump to his great friend, Nancy Mitford and read, “The Pursuit of Happiness” and “Love in a Cold Climate”.

Switch to Jessica Mitford and read, the autobiography, “Hons and Rebels”.

Back to Nancy and Evelyn for, “The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh”.

Then why not treat yourself to a slice of Max Beerbohm, “Zuleika Dobson”?

Finally present a lit match to a fat Cohiba or Montecristo (unfortunately not available to the good denizens of the United States), and in true Edward VII fashion, rest on those laurels.

[FranzS]

Ah, Evelyn Waugh, one the great Edwardian novelists.



??? "Edwardian" refers to the reign of Edward VII, who died in 1910. Waugh was writing in the middle decades of the 20th Century.

[Prince Smiles]

??? "Edwardian" refers to the reign of Edward VII, who died in 1910. Waugh was writing in the middle decades of the 20th Century.

Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903, was he not Edwardian ? Are you defined by the period you were born in, or the period you were primarily active in?

Yes, Edward VII gave up the ghost in 1910, but the Edwardian period is often stretched longer, up to 1920.

Waugh wrote Decline and Fall in 1928, so maybe I'm stretching it rather too taut!

He had that wonderful Edwardian feel about him, did he not?
Well, I do beg your partridge then old chap, how does 'Inter-bellum Novelist' grab you?:cold:

[kelby_lake]

The movie just slavishly copies the TV adaptation- and fails. The 1981 Jeremy Irons adaptation is definitive.

[MANICHAEAN]

I say Prince, " Inter-bellum Novelist!" What! Can't have language like that here, even if a chaps a bounder.

P.S. You are bang on with the "Sword of Honour" trilogy for the hors d'ouvre, followed by "Brideshead Revisted" for the meat & veg. Might I suggest "Scoop" or "Black Mischief" for pudding. Makes such a change from Spotted Dick.

Your obedient servant.

M.

[dfloyd]

Brideshead Revisited was a good adaptation of the novel, made by Masterpiece Theatre, I believe. But there were many great adaptations by MP. Probably the best .... yes, better than brideshead ... was I,Claudius.

I think its best to start with Waugh's earlier comedic novels and progress upward through Sword of Honour starring James Bond in the movie adaptation.

I have Folio Society editions of Scoop, Black Mischief, and Brideshead Revisited in excellent condition if anyone is iterested in buying.

[Prince Smiles]

I say Prince, " Inter-bellum Novelist!" What! Can't have language like that here, even if a chaps a bounder.

P.S. You are bang on with the "Sword of Honour" trilogy for the hors d'ouvre, followed by "Brideshead Revisted" for the meat & veg. Might I suggest "Scoop" or "Black Mischief" for pudding. Makes such a change from Spotted Dick.

Your obedient servant.

M.

Manichaien,
hoc est bellum!

Only jesting. Sincerest apologies are in order for my errant labeling , I do hope that I haven’t affected your sensibilities.

Sir, the desert items on your menu are met with much relish and approbation.
A nice “Scoop” will certainly hit the spot after our main vittles.

Waugh’s novels are such fun, easy reading. You can polish off Scoop in two sittings. In this light, I prefer not to sit slack jawed in front of the silver screen when his work is so accessible, no matter how accomplished an actor Jeremy Irons proves to be.

Actually, one can enjoy Jeremy without the visuals, hence engaging one’s imagination; which is why we read books instead of watching movies all the time and posting on IMDb is it not?

-There is available a fine audio book recording of Jeremy reading Brideshead.

I advocate, Read-Along-With-Jeremy and enjoy one of the greatest love stories of the “20th Century” narrated to you exclusively.



A standalone platitude to mull over: Movies, like music videos strip you of much imaginative input.



The following is completely ex mero motu, and should taken with that pinch of sodium chloride:

It pains me to see our Evelyn, who was born an Edwardian, who dressed as an Edwardian, wrote Edwardian prose, and acted as one, shoved in amongst the 20th Century novelist crowd.

Send him back I say! Send him back! While we are at it, let’s prune a few more: Kipling (born 1865 - Dickens was still alive), E.M Forster (1879), Somerset Maugham (1847).

Why is Oscar Wilde, born 1854, classed as 19th Century but Somerset (1847) 20th?

And I am sure Mr. Waugh would not mind me bowing out of any conversation concerning him with, OPI, Oremus Pro Invicem

[Gertrude73]

http://www.infoocean.info/avatar2.jpgI find his character diabolical in the novel.

[Ron Price]

REVISITING BRIDESHEAD

Revisiting Brideshead was televised last night.1 I had seen this 11 part series on television back in the 1980s or early 1990s after it first came out in 1981. I had not read the novel, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by English writer Evelyn Waugh which was first published in 1945. In 2015 I had the pleasure of seeing the 2008 film version.2 I wrote about the TV series and the film after I had retired from my 50 year life-experience as a student and in paid employment, 1949-1999, and after I had seen the series a second time in Australia.

The Flyte family who lived at Brideshead symbolises the English nobility, and Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy brings that nobility to life. One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age." Viewers, millions, enjoy the opulent and aristocratic edge, the glitter and gloss, the grandeur and the glamour of this wealthy family estate, and of a time in our history now quickly dying-out, if not long gone. In this one house, as one reviewer put it, is a fading, a dying, empire; or is it just sublime real estate. For many, in the millennial and generation Z, I can just about hear them clicking on the remote and uttering a now familiar word, a word especially familiar to people like me who retired after more than 30 years in classrooms: borrrring!

There's room for more than one Brideshead in this far less glamorous day and age, though, room at least for the baby-boomers and for the silent generation among the viewing public, with the glitter and gloss of society now often tarnished beyond repair in our complex 21st century.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2, 11:55-12:45, 19 & 20/9/’11, and 2ABCTV, 8/2/'15, 10:05-11:30 pm.

1981 was a bad year in the UK
with 2 & ½ million out of work
and a list of bad news to fill all
those English heads to the top.1

There was nothing like this bit
of escapism from the real world
into a nostalgic, a romanticized
past, homoerotic suggestiveness,
Evelyn Waugh’s WW2 vision.2

I’ll let all you readers find out
what it all meant to Waugh, to
his critics & to modern viewers
whose views are available for us
to see on that new source of info:
the internet, the world-wide-web.3

1 See Wikipedia for all the bad news in 1981.

2 Waugh wrote in the preface to the 1959 edition of the book that he was appalled by his book, and that he found rereading it distasteful. I was only 15 at the time, and had read none of Waugh. I lived in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in love with sport and at least 3 girls. The plot of the book was set in 1943-1944, in the months when I was in utero.

3 I was particularly interested in Waugh’s defence of Catholicism, his critique of secular humanism, and his emphasis on the many forms of conversion that take place in peoples’ lives.

Ron Price
20/9/'11 to 12/2/'15.
-------------------------------------------------------------
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

Part 1:

In the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 the novel Brideshead Revisited was written in England. In those same months I existed in utero on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. When Evelyn Waugh, the author of this novel, wrote his preface to a revised edition of the book in 1959, and Fr. Ronald Knox published his biography of Waugh in that same year---I was 15 and had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in the middle of my adolescent baseball and ice-hockey careers. By my 20s my sport-playing days had ended, although I have remained a Baha’i all my life.

Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 In the end, this is a common experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike, especially in our troubled-age. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2

Part 2:

Waugh saw this novel, Brideshead Revisited, as his magnum opus but, on reading it later in life, he found what he called its "rhetorical and ornamental language.....distasteful."3 Readers with the interest in this film and this novel should surf-about on Wikipedia and other internet sources for all sorts of bits-and-pieces of information and analysis.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh(1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, W.W. Norton & Co., NY., 1987 & 1992, resp., V.2, p.492; and3 Wikipedia.

Part 3:

Without Christianity you saw
civilization doomed or, as you
put it in your conversion: “it is
like stepping out of a Looking-
Glass world, where everything
is an absurd caricature, into the
real world God made, and then
begins the delicious process of
exploring it limitlessly.”1..This
is perhaps the most succinct &
sufficient description of process
in the act of conversions that ever
were written in that 20th century.

Waugh's own conversion from the
"absurd caricature" of what might
be called ultra-modernity to that
real world of Catholic orthodoxy
was greeted with astonishment by
the literary world and it caused a
sensation in the media. Do those
who have watched Brideshead in
these last 30 years know of this?
I did not until today and, wanting
to know something about how this
television series and film came into
existence in those last twenty-five
years: 1981 to 2007, I learned that
there was much to learn with a little
research and reading, and not even
reading E. Waugh's book at all.......

Part 4:

“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests."

Waugh concluded the above press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared in Lay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968.

Ron Price
14/7/'11 to 12/2/'15.

[WICKES]

Any other fans of Brideshead Revisited / Evelyn Waugh? Brideshead Revisited is probably my favorite novel. The story and theme of the book are very meaningful to me. I want to read more Waugh. I've read "The Loved One" as well. Still haven't seen the famous television version of Brideshead Revisited, though. I saw the movie they made a few years ago and hated it...don't remember exactly why, I think it was because they turned the novel into a love story and missed the whole point that it's about God's grace acting in the world.

His prose is the most beautiful I have ever read. I know I am supposed to admire Nabokov and Joyce and Woolf more, but I just don't. He is also funnier than any other writer I know, with the possible exception of PG Wodehouse and Huysman. He is certainly far, far funnier than Wilde. And if that wasn't enough, he had a genius for creating characters. I am amazed he isn't more highly regarded.