–Simon Heffer has written for the Daily Telegraph an article entitled: “Never mind the lavish TV series–Brideshead Revisited is a woefully overrated novel: Time has not improved Waugh’s celebrated classic, whose glamour disguises a surprisingly joyless vision of humanity”. The article opens with this history of Heffer’s readings of the novel:
I feel I missed the right time of life to read Brideshead Revisited, the novel which Waugh with an apparently straight face, described as his “magnum opus”. I was about 17 when I first devoured it and found it highly devouring, though even in the arrogance of youth, I realised I probably wasn’t “getting” all of it. Now, almost half a century later, I have just read it again, and realise I should almost certainly have revisited Brideshead Revisited about 25 years ago when I was the same age as the central character (I resist saying “hero” because he isn’t one), Charles Ryder. Then I might have “got” it more profoundly. Now, characters and situations that seemed devilishly funny when I was an impressionable youth seem simply ghastly, and I wonder whether this highly acclaimed novel is actually half as good as most think it is…
What follows is an admittedly biased but thorough, accurate and entertaining summary of the novel from Heffer’s present point of view. He concludes with this:
…On my re-reading, I was overcome by the utter bleakness of the story. Waugh was brutally cynical from birth and a pretty unpleasant man, but the war and the upheaval of society in which he felt reasonably comfortable poisoned his spirit. With the exception of Cordelia, the Marchmain’s youngest child, who had the makings of a saint, every major character in the book and most of the minor ones are rather loathsome, usually because they are so self-obsessed and morally defective. Although Lady Marchmain and Lord Brideshead, her elder son, are devout, they are also obnoxious in their narrow-mindedness. Waugh’s ridicule, notably of Charles’s cranky father, now seem overdone, and the humour of the snobbery soon wears thin. I am in no doubt that Brideshead Revisited is a book that every intelligent person should read, but only once, and preferably in early middle age.
A link to the full article is available here but it may require a subscription to open it. I may say that some specific mention of Anthony Blanche as being among the memorable characters might have been appreciated.
–The Rising Tide Foundation has posted on YouTube the recording of a lecture entitled “How the British Empire Created and Destroyed Orwell”. The lecturer is Martin Sieff. The recording (presumably with Q&A) runs for about 2 hours. Here is the description of a 8 minute segment:
[12:04] – The Paradoxical Contemporary: George Orwell vs. Evelyn Waugh A fascinating contrast between two literary giants who deeply admired yet utterly baffled one another—the secular socialist who loathed empire versus the traditionalist Catholic monarchist who loved it.
The entire lecture and the summary may be accessed here.
—Literary Review has posted the review of a book by Ollie Randall about the literary side of the game of cricket. This is entitled Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketeers Changed English Culture. The Waugh brothers make a contribution according to the LR’s review:
…[J.M.] Barrie also enlisted the services of Alec Waugh, a capable batsman whose first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), was well received. Shortly after its publication, Waugh was captured on the Western Front, the event ‘generating a burst of headlines’, and spent the rest of the war in a fortress at Mainz. His younger brother, Evelyn, wrote a sour account of his only outing on the field of play, while Alec recorded that his ‘attempts to teach [Evelyn] cricket inculcated in him a permanent repugnance for the game’…
The full review is available here.
