…A visceral distrust of European Modernism–emblematic of British xenophobia in general–is captured in Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Decline and Fall (1928), which revolves around the destruction of an unrestored sixteenth-century Hampshire country house called King’s Thursday, deemed “the finest piece of domestic Tudor in England.” At its new owner’s behest, this fictive landmark is torn down and replaced by a soulless International Style house designed by Professor Otto Silenus, a German Modernist architect transparently based on Walter Gropius, the chilly and officious founder of the Bauhaus. Silenus complies with the patron’s vague request for “something clean and square,” but before it is completed he delivers a cartoonish screed that echoes Waugh’s deep-seated antipathy to the new:“The problem of architecture as I see it,” he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferroconcrete and aluminium, is the problem of all art–the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because it is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,” he said gloomily; “please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.”
–From The Times comes an article by Janice Turner entitled: “Spontaneity succumbed to Covid, like so much else.” Here is an excerpt:
Late for a train — yes, because I hadn’t “pre-booked” — I had to sprint across the King’s Cross concourse. “Where do I change for Hull?” I gasped, and the train steward’s accent, warm and familiar, instantly calmed me down. “Doncaster, love.”
I’ve passed through my old home town en route to York since my mother died in 2022, but not set foot there. No reason. No one left to visit. And in the 20 minutes at Doncaster station until my connection, it felt very wrong not to be rushing up the steps to find a taxi, bracing myself for a day at the care home. Platform announcements pricked my heart: Scarborough (where my parents were happiest), Wakefield (my godmother’s home), South Elmsall (the run-down pit town where all my family lived).
Hull is not Doncaster: Londoners might not discern a different accent but I still can. On the way back, another half-hour change at Doncaster, I felt what Evelyn Waugh described (writing of cradle Catholicism) as “a twitch upon the thread”. I need to go north.
–In an earlier edition, The Times carried a story by James Marriott about Donald Trump’s foreign policy negotiating skills (or lack thereof). Here’s the conclusion:
…Of course the answer to cynicism is not naivety. How often is the serious study of history an exercise in discovering the terrible smallness of great men? US foreign policy in South America and the Middle East has often made a mockery of high-sounding phrases: has any war in recent history been heralded with more jubilant hootings over its “moral mission” than our tawdry and tragic outing in Iraq? America’s critics are not wrong to remind us that it has often acted disgracefully. But I am reminded of the expostulation directed by an outraged lady to the writer Evelyn Waugh: “How can you behave so badly — and you a Catholic!” To which Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.”
Even sceptics of the West’s claims to moral superiority should accept that a more idealistic political culture offered statesmen with their eyes on the history books an important inducement to better behaviour. It is to that fading culture of idealism that we owe our foreign aid programme and billionaires like Bill Gates who spend their money eradicating malaria rather than buying political influence. Anybody listening to Europe’s leaders over the weekend knows that high-flown idealism can risk sounding implausible. But in these dark times, we all need it. Citizens no less than politicians.
–The Diario de Sevilla has an article about a review by Ignacio PeyrĂł of a new biography of Spanish writer Julio Iglesias, entitled The Spaniard Who Fell in Love with the World. It opens with this (translation by Google):
There have been many biographies as a genre, with weight and scope. Academic and thoughtful. Literary but widely read and popular (think of Stefan Zweig’s Antoinette or Magellan). There have been canonical ones, knowing that all roads lead to Rome ( Suetonius’s Parallel Lives or Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars ). There are also hybrid ones, by author, like Emmanuele Carrère’s Limonov (you can now see the eponymous film about the unclassifiable Russian poet and quarrelsome man made by Kirill Serebrennikov). And there is Evelyn Waugh’s about the Catholic and martyr Edmund Campion, one of the favourites, precisely, of Ignacio PeyrĂł (Madrid, 1980)….
