—The Economist has an article about the updating of the “basket of goods” put together by the UK’s Office for National Statistics for the purpose of measuring inflation. Here is an excerpt:
To read the contents list of the basket of goods, updated this week by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), is an intriguing experience. For economists it offers a sober measure of consumer-price inflation. For everyone else it is a births-and-deaths column for British consumerism, announcing the arrival of some objects and acting, for others, as their epitaph.
Thus this week the list noted the arrival of “men’s sliders” and the demise of newspaper advertisements. It has previously recorded the demise of linoleum (in 1980), of corsets (1970) and of oil lamps (1947). Its very name is a relic: that word “basket” sounding like something that might have hung from the arm of a British housewife as she went to the shops in her mackintosh (1947-52) to buy Brussels sprouts (1947-2006). Sometimes, it is an enigma: in the 2000s a “small caged mammal” appeared, unexpectedly, in the ONS’s calculations.
The basket itself, in its modern form, was born in 1947. The political mood was tense. British families, who had paid a high price—in some cases the ultimate one—for the war were angry at the high prices they had to pay for everything else in the peace….
As well as about many other, more unappetising things. The 1947 list, at the height of rationing, shows a nation surviving on Brussels sprouts, margarine and the ominously oblique “compound cooking fat”. This, Evelyn Waugh later wrote, was “a bleak period of present privation” and, he added, even more bleakly, “of soya beans”. Rationed food was“unbelievably dreary”, says Max Hastings, a historian.
It did not fill stomachs but did, oddly, fill books. In the “hungry novels” of wartime and post-war Britain, British novelists with poor diets and rich imaginations allowed their characters to gorge on the foods which they could not. In “Brideshead Revisited” Sebastian Flyte eats strawberries and sips Château Peyraguey beneath a spreading summer elm. It “isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted,” he says. Given that “Brideshead” was published in 1945, and “table wine” didn’t appear until 1980, this was probably true…
Here’s a link to the full article.
—Liberties, a quarterly journal of culture and politics published in Washington, has in its latest issue a reassessment of Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. This is written by Henry Oliver and entitled “Evelyn Waugh’s Decadent Redemption”. It opens with this:
Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. It is beloved, but it also provokes antipathy — as it always has. When Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel in 1945 many of his fellow writers reviled it. They, like so many secular contemporary readers, found its Catholicism bizarre, its breathless depiction of the upper classes appalling, and the prose grossly over-stylized. All of this was intentional. Brideshead was supposed to be a door into a lost world…
The first part describes the book and considers its critical reception. That section concludes with this:
Readers often grumble that the luscious Oxford section which opens Brideshead gives over to a slower, dimmer setting. Such a bait and switch! Such delicious bait! Why did the author, capable of heaping details about pleasures, art, silk ties, country houses, poetry, and wealth — why did such an author suddenly throw us out of Paradise? Why all this strange religious fervor? Where are the strawberries and champagne? What happened to the madrigals?
Objections are more than aesthetic.Why must Sebastian suffer? Why must Lord Marchmain come home to die in splendour and convert? Why, oh why, must the love stories fail? So many readers find the ending unbearable. One writer I know cried on the underground the last time he read it.
An excellent reappraisal  which appeared in the New Statesman in 2023 said Brideshead was “quite inexplicable to non-Catholics.” Even Jeffrey Manley of the Evelyn Waugh Society recommends crossing out the religious parts so you are left with a funny novel. All of this is disastrously wrong. Without the operation of divine grace, Brideshead would be merely a sketch, a series of scenes. What makes the novel great is the power of its ending which vibrates with emotion and fervor. And it cannot work without God. We can only appreciate Paradise in our fallen world…
It then proceeds with a description of Waugh’s writing the book and the author’s own assessment after multiple readings over several years. The article is well written and worth reading. It is available at this link.
–Another website called The Homebound Symphony contains a comment on the article discussed above. The comment relates to Waugh’s closing passage where Charles Ryder encounters the “small red flame” emitted by a lamp still burning in the Brideshead chapel at the end of the war (and the story). Here’s an excerpt:
…Oliver says that Waugh’s point here is that “what animates modern civilization is the way the lights burn and the bells ring as they have done throughout Christendom in the one true church.” He goes on to say, “There is only one light left burning at the end of this book of shadows: not the lights of Oxford, not the sparkles of diamonds, not the candlelit beauty of Brideshead house, but the lamp in the chapel.”
What Oliver may not know is that this is a sanctuary lamp: the candle lit next to the tabernacle, that is, the receptacle (usually in a niche in a wall) where the consecrated Host is kept. It is typically, though not always, distinguished from other lights in the church by being placed in a red glass chimney, thus the “small red flame.” …
The point here is that the light that Waugh invokes at the end of Brideshead is not just any old religious candle — any old light in a church, even in a chapel of the One True Church — but the light that marks the presence of the consecrated Host, the bread transformed into the flesh of Christ, “the present immanence of God.” This is why in many churches people do not pass the tabernacle, when the candle it lit to indicate its contents, without bowing. This, we may infer, is what Charles Ryder does that morning in the Brideshead chapel.
–A Lithuanian website notes the translation of another of Waugh’s novels into the language of that Baltic country:
During the Vilnius Book Fair, another book by English writer Evelyn Waugh translated into Lithuanian was presented – his novel “Elena”, which tells the story of the empress Helena, who lived at the turn of the 3rd-4th centuries, and whom the Catholic Church venerates as the saint who discovered the true cross of Christ. His translator Augminas Petronis talks about the work.
As noted in a previous post, at least two of his other novels have been published in Lithuanian translations: Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited. Translation is by Google. Full article is available here.
