–Ben Lawrence writes in the Daily Telegraph that “The arts are now terrified of God”. Here are the opening paragraphs:
“We don’t do God.” Such was Alastair Campbell’s Rottweiler-like shutdown of journalists asking about the faith of his then-boss Tony Blair. Those words, spoken in 2003, still haunt British politics and culture today. To be fair, Campbell’s intervention has always seemed sensible to me. Bringing one’s personal religious beliefs into an arena of utter tribalism is always going to create a collision course between the personal and the public. But religion and culture have had a more fascinating, if fractious, relationship for centuries. And while the National Gallery’s new show, Siena, proves that there’s still a thirst for the numinous, it also serves to highlight the fact that the arts in contemporary Britain is reluctant to “do God” – which is a seriously bleak state of affairs.
In recent times, most worryingly, there has even been a move to remove religion from works where it has been previously tantamount. The Golden Compass (2007), Warner Bros’s cinematic adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, was doomed as soon as they took out its ecclesiastical themes; they lost the great Tom Stoppard, the film’s original adapter, in the process. I’ve also heard a rumour that the previously announced BBC TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was dropped because nobody was sure what to do with the intense Catholicism of the Marchmain family, which is integral to the novel’s power.
How did this happen? The marginalisation of public faith in Britain has a lot to do with it. Fewer than half the population of the United Kingdom now sees themselves as Christian, while Islam, the second largest religion, is only practised by four million Britons, or around six-and-a-half per cent of us. But it isn’t simply that the relevance of religion would appear to be diminishing. The fact is that many people in the arts have become reluctant to engage in anything that’s likely to prove controversial – and religion has always been so…
–Two newspapers have recently posted stories about the gardens at Stancombe Park in Dursley, Glos. The longer and more detailed one is by Marion Mako and appears in Country Life. It begins with a history and description of the gardens and estate and continues with this:
…Stancombe Park was a short stroll from Evelyn Waugh’s home at Piers Court and the author, like Sebastian Flyte, surely rested ‘supine on a sunny seat in the colonnade’ overlooking the fountain, although this one is smaller than the ‘dominating’ Italianate one that Waugh conjured up in Brideshead Revisited. ‘It was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley… [the river] had been dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty beeches at their margin. The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds… And lest the eye wander aimlessly a Doric temple stood by the water’s edge.’
Close to the temple are two cottages of warm Cotswold stone. Built in the cottage ornée style and originally housing estate workers, they are suggestive of John Nash’s 1811 Blaise Hamlet in Bristol. Leaving the temple behind, the lakeside path runs under an arbour of Vitis coignetiae to rejoin the labyrinthine network. The upper path leads to a camellia grove, studded with specimens of various shades, including the enormous Camellia japonica ‘Yukimi-guruma’ with its fried egg-like flowers. Hidden beyond are two little cupola-topped huts that likely doubled as changing rooms and as winter protection for the more tender plants. Overhung by a magnificent Clerodendrum trichotomum, their view is of an ornate tiered swan fountain. Perhaps this was the inspiration for Waugh’s fountain, ‘found there a century ago by one of Sebastian’s ancestors; found, purchased, imported, and re-erected in an alien but welcoming climate’…
The article which is accompanied by excellent illustrations can be read at this link.
The other, briefer article appears in The Express and stresses the Doric Temple at the top of the gardens as the central point of interest. This is written by Jessica Knibbs and includes this reference to Waugh:
…The setting is something out of a fairytale and was said to have inspired author Evelyn Waugh, who wrote in her [sic] novel Brideshead Revisited about a Doric temple which overlooked a lake.
Perhaps the less said about this article, the better. Waugh was briefly employed as a probationary reporter when the paper was known as The Daily Express and despised the then owner Lord Beaverbrook. The illustrations might be worth a look.
—The Guardian has an article based on a new book that discusses the state of higher education in Britain. Here’s the opening:
Don’t treat dons like schoolmasters; treat them as you would the vicar at home,’ Charles Ryder is advised at he arrives at Oxford at the start of Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh seems in tune with a wider public scepticism towards ‘boffins’.
Indeed, it is almost a source of national pride: a tribute to our practical conservatism. ‘When intellectual or aesthetic matters are regarded as the centre of interest, one is apt to be plagued by the sham intellectual, than whom no more insufferable being walks the earth,’ warned Harold Nicolson.
But a fascinating new history suggests such cultural thuggery is little to worry about. Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds argues that since the days of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his plans for a clerisy – a cadre of public intellectuals – highbrows have been obsessing over their demise. Today’s commentators rue the absence of such great minds as Isaiah Berlin, EP Thompson or Iris Murdoch. But those self-same intellectuals had themselves lamented the loss of the TS Eliots, RH Tawneys and Virginia Woolfs of yesteryear. And so it goes on….
–Finally, the website of The Fleming Foundation, a sort of academic think tank, has announced an upcoming program that
…will be devoted to the late Sam Francis’ favorite novel, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. We shall probably also take up the first four books of Xenophon’s Anabasis, which Edward Gibbon regarded as the liveliest of historical narratives, the Old Testament books of Job and Tobit and the corresponding Greek play Aeschylus’ Prometheus’ Bound, and Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman.
The first episode will be broadcast before the end of March. We shall probably have a surprise guest and we invite our readers to post questions as comments to this announcement.
Further details may become available at this link.
