—The Irish Rover, a newspaper sponsored by University of Notre Dame (in Indiana, not Ireland), has posted a brief article on the origins of “Arcadia”. This is by Santiago Legarre who is a visiting professor at the Notre Dame Law School. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Evelyn Waugh famously called “Et in Arcadia Ego” the first long section of Brideshead Revisited. Even though it might seem at first glance that “ego” is Charles Ryder (the protagonist) and “Arcadia,” Oxford, a closer inspection of the novel and of the Latin in the phrase suggests that the more likely intended meaning of those words (inscribed on a skull) is that “Death reigns too in Arcadia.” Paintings by Guercino and Poussin, depicting herders around tombs in a bucolic environment, contribute to confirm this interpretation of the phrase, especially as Charles, in the fiction, was a painter, likely familiar with those works, one of which is named “Et in Arcadia Ego.”
Leaving aside the original public meaning of the phrase as a memento mori (legal pun intended!), I would like to offer here a competing but complementary interpretation. For these purposes I will briefly elaborate on the nature of Arcadia as a place, if a place indeed it is. I find useful to explore at the same time a different but related question: Who dwells in Arcadia?
It is my submission that in Brideshead Revisited (and in similar other contexts) “Arcadia” is better understood not as a place but as a state of affairs. The phrase’s reference has certainly no meaningful connection with the contemporary Greek region (“Arcadia”) or with the “Acadia” that in the eighteenth century moved from somewhere in Canada to somewhere in what today is Louisiana. (The missing “r” in the latter is a mystery worth resolving, though this assumes that the “r” is indeed missing.)…
The full story can be accessed at this link.
–The TLS has posted a review about artists of the interwar years. This is by Daren Coffield and is entitled Queens of Bohemia, And other misfits. It is reviewed by Libby Purves. Here are some excerpts:
Darren Coffield is a painter of no small repute in the generation of the 1990s known as the YBAs (Young British Artists: he once notably did a heroic portrait of Arthur Scargill in the medium of coal dust). In Tales from the Colony Room (2020), he collated oral history and memoirs of a notorious drinking club on Dean Street in Soho. In Queens of Bohemia he focuses on the women who were artists, muses, club hostesses or companions in the years of classic bohemianism in Soho and Fitzrovia, from the 1920s to the 1950s.
It’s a big canvas, from the age of flappers, through cafe society and wartime mavericks, right to the leading edge of the Swinging Sixties. Figures range from impoverished artists to showbiz stars such as Hermione Baddeley, but Coffield feels that too often the light has fallen chiefly on the men. Women, he says, were the “dark matter holding bohemia together and keeping its stars in their orbit”. But, struggling to be seen and hampered by legal inequality, they “posed political, moral and existential challenges to authority and gave rise to a new way of living”….
There are a few likeable figures; more among the women, from Kathleen Hale, creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat, to a strongwoman known as the Mighty Mannequin, who tore telephone directories in half and bent a poker round a man’s neck. Tallulah Bankhead seems an amiable toughie, as does the eccentric hotelier Rosa Lewis, who was once kind to a “morose” little boy among the Churchill family called Winston. She turns up fictionally in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. …
The book ends with a regretful account of how, after the Sexual Offences Act 1959, prostitution went indoors, and a more cheerful reflection that the women of that bohemian world were responsible for preparing the ground for feminism. That may be news to hundreds of quieter-behaved scholars, scientists, politicians and teachers, but never mind. From Jacob Epstein to Dylan Thomas, Walter Sickert to Lucian Freud, the boho artistic impetus is too often mixed either with callous insouciance about women and children or with morbid and creepy perversion (mistress’s aborted foetuses in pickle jars under the bed, coprophilia, etc). Maybe Darren Coffield has chosen the worst of bohemia, and could with equal justice have given it a bit more of a forgiving shine. But this record is not unimportant.
–The Financial Times published the letter posted below in its Friday edition (15 November):
By a curious coincidence, shortly before I read Camilla Cavendish’s column (“Labour must make good on its promise to the private sector”, Opinion, FT.com, FT Weekend, November 2) advising that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government needs to understand “what it means to risk your own capital in a venture”, I read the following lines about those that “are serenely ignorant of the anxieties that beset the small company director; the yearly struggle to present a plausible balance sheet; the harassed perusal of the national budget which may, by some incidence of taxation, close carefully prepared markets and turn a marginal profit into a dead loss. They live in a Utopian socialist state untroubled by the ardours and asperities of private enterprise.” It was written in 1930, by the British novelist Evelyn Waugh in his travel book Labels. Plus ça change . . . Geoffrey Wort Stockbridge, Hampshire, UK
–An article by Iain Martin on Waugh’s close friend Harold Acton has been posted on the website Reaction.life. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Harold Mario Mitchell Acton, the son of Arthur Acton, was born in 1904. His father was an illegitimate offspring of an adviser to the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, and consequently he and Harold were less distinguished scion of the Acton family than they liked to suggest.
What transformed his father’s and his own circumstances was his American mother’s inherited wealth; it supported and shaped Harold’s long and privileged life. The main source for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, Harold was a nomad, not entirely a citizen of anywhere. Waugh’s fictional depiction captures the essence:
“An attempt had been made in his childhood to make an Englishman of him; he was two years at Eton; then in the middle of the [First] war he had defied the submarines, re-joined his mother in the Argentine, and a clever and audacious schoolboy was added to the valet, the maid, the two chauffeurs … Criss-cross about the world he travelled with them … When peace came they returned to Europe, to hotels and furnished villas, spas and casinos … he dined with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev … At times we all seemed children beside him…”
The complete article may be accessed at this link.
