Waugh, The Revisionist

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest edition of Commonweal magazine has an essay by veteran Waugh scholar Robert Murray Davis. This is entitled “‘Brideshead’ Revisited and Revised: The Mixed Reception of Waugh’s Most Famous Novel.” In this, he traces the critical reception of Brideshead Revisited and explains how Waugh reacted to it by writing multiple revisions to the book. Prof Davis identifies critical reactions firstly from Waugh’s close friends who were provided advance copies of the book in a limited edition. These resulted in substantial revisions to that early version which became what Davis describes as essentially the page proofs of the book. He also incorporated a message to detractors (without mentioning them) in the dustwrapper notes for the UK edition. Then, while he was serving in the Army in Jugoslavia, Waugh relied on Nancy Mitford to collect the reactions and gossip relating to the published edition and pass them on to him in her correspondence.

Finally, the formal opinions of the critics are considered, most of them favorable. The only initial criticism to which Waugh reacted in writing was that of Desmond MacCarthy in The Sunday Times. This was overall positive but raised certain points that Waugh addresses in correspondence with MacCarthy:

Waugh thanked MacCarthy for the review but added, “I was pleased with the book when I finished it, but since then the rats and moths have been at me and I was despondent about it,” adding “I am eager to learn your criticisms of my method.” MacCarthy’s criticisms in his letter of June 18 were of a kind familiar in the work of later critics and, by 1960, in Waugh’s own final view of the novel. Foremost were the soliloquies of Julia and her father, which, MacCarthy felt, overshadowed dramatic situations. He was also concerned about Charles’s indifference to his children; about whether or not Anthony Blanche’s criticisms of Ryder’s paintings were intended to be seen as accurate; and—more a concern to other readers than to him—about why Lady Marchmain was a bad mother.

Prof Davis also notes negative criticism from sources such as Edmund Wilson, novelist Rose McCauley and journalist Conor Cruise O’Brien. Waugh reacted to both constructive comments from friends and more serious objections from critics by making small but frequent edits in the UK editions of the book. Finally, in the fullness of time, and after fighting with Hollywood over an aborted movie version of the book, Waugh made substantial revisions which were incorporated into a new and revised UK edition that appeared in 1960. This included a new preface by Waugh in which he explained some of the revisions and his reasons for making them.

Prof Davis, who was responsible for cataloguing the Waugh archives acquired in the late 1960s by the University of Texas, has written extensively about Waugh’s practice of revising his books. E.g. Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed and Evelyn Waugh, Writer. While Brideshead was probably subject to more revising than any of the others, Davis once warned his fellow scholars studying any of Waugh’s books that: (1) consistency between different editions of a Waugh novel should never be assumed; (2) Waugh was capable of altering not only details but important elements of the story; and (3) study of the textual history of Waugh’s novels was not only essential but almost certain to be rewarding. This latest article about Waugh’s revisionism is probably based on Prof Davis’s work as co-editor of the CWEW edition of Brideshead.

UPDATE (17 January 2018): A few minor edits were made relating to Waugh’s reaction to the critical reception.

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Celebrities and Waugh: Roundup

Posted on January 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The press is replete with celebrities citing Evelyn Waugh this week. In the Daily Express, actor Freddie Fox cited Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited as one of his six favorite books:

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint” is a beautiful line at the beginning. Waugh was a sensational writer and conjures an image of the past I find quixotic and also sad in its nostalgia.

He comes from a distinguished thespian family (father is Edward; mother, Joanna David; uncle, James; cousin, Laurence). Other favorites include Flashman at the Charge, The Secret History, and John Donne’s Selected Poems.

Actress Kristin Scott Thomas has an interview in The Irish Times that extends over her entire career. Most recently she appeared in the Winston Churchill docudrama The Darkest Hour. She finds she has generally had better success with her roles in French films, although there are exceptions:

… it’s interesting to note the films she speaks most fondly of: a 1988 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust; the Romanian comedy An Unforgettable Summer (shot not too long after the fall of Ceausescu); Catherine Corsini’s marital-implosion drama, Leaving.

The Handful of Dust adaptation was a product of the same producer/director team that gave us the 1981 Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.

A different class of celebrity is represented in The Tatler which has an article by Richard Prendlebury about the careers of famous English war correspondents. The article seems to focus on the career of William Howard Russell who reported the Crimean War for The Times as its paradigm, but gives Evelyn Waugh his due:

Who could fill [his shoes] after Russell was gone? Not … the writer Evelyn Waugh, who covered the Abyssinian campaign for the Daily Mail in 1936. He did so with little enthusiasm and a singular lack of sympathy for the embattled country. But his observations, dressed in fiction, became the satirical novel Scoop, the war correspondent’s ‘bible’, as it is so often described. Waugh managed to capture the absurdity of almost everything about the job – let’s say 95 per cent – that occurs until the time when one is on the frontline and among those who are trying their very best to kill each other.

Finally, perennial celebrity wannabee Taki Theodoracopulos has written an essay on his weblog in which he bemoans the decline in the English aristocratic standards marked by Prince Harry’s choice of a mixed-race American actress as his bride. He supposes that:

Snobs like Evelyn Waugh, who wrote about madcap aristocrats and their follies, must be really turning over in their graves. Today’s Charles Ryder more resembles Rex Mottram in his search for an ideal wife, celebrity and money replacing blue blood and tradition. Everyone, even a writer for The Spectator by the noble name of Harry Mount, has called this state of affairs marvelous: the fact that class barriers of the past have been replaced by barriers of money and fame, even beauty. I am not among them.

Once again, I am not sure I grasp this point about Waugh’s characters. Both Charles Ryder and Rex Mottram in their day sought the hand of the same English aristocratic beauty–Julia Flyte. And in their day, Rex already had the money and celebrity as a businessman and politician and wasn’t seeking more of that through his marriage to Julia but was seeking heightened social status. And Charles had already married an aristocrat of a higher status that Julia who didn’t come freighted with Julia’s Roman Catholic baggage. So how would Charles be more like Rex today? Taki seems to have picked up this confusion from the same Harry Mount article he criticises in his essay. See earlier post.

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Orwell’s Religion in this Week’s Tablet

Posted on January 12, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

D J Taylor writing in the latest edition of The Tablet addresses the issue of George Orwell’s attitude toward religion in general and the Roman Catholic church in particular. This is in an essay entitled “The Other Saint George: George Orwell’s Nuanced and Ambivalent Views on Religion.”  Taylor, who has also written a biography of Orwell, opens with this discussion of how his friends considered his religious tendencies:

What Orwell thought about religion is necessarily complicated by his friends’ habit of conceiving him in explicitly religious terms. V. S. Pritchett thought him “a kind of saint”. Anthony Powell, too, reckoned him “in his way, a sort of saint, even if not one in sparkling raiment bright”. Evelyn Waugh, visiting him in a Gloucestershire sanitorium in the year before his death, pronounced that he was “very near to God”. To which it may be added that Orwell himself greatly distrusted the notion of personal sanctity, and wrote a pointed little essay on Gandhi whose asceticism he found deeply suspect. Sainthood, he decided, was a condition best avoided by living men and women.

According to Taylor, Orwell’s “personal life was rooted in conventional early 20th-century Anglicanism…while his moral beliefs, founded on such code words as “fairness” and “decency”, are essentially Judeo-Christian…” He did, however, have anti-Catholic tendencies, despite (or perhaps because of) his early schooling by Ursuline nuns in a Henley convent:

The thought that to Orwell Catholicism is itself a form of totalitarianism whose dogmas are imposed not to buttress any particular law but merely to reinforce the power structures that lie behind them has clearly occurred to Michael G. Brennan [in his recent book George Orwell and Religion]… No question that the evidence Brennan marshals in his assault on Orwell the anti-Catholic bigot isn’t damning in the extreme. From Ronald Knox to Monsignor Hugh Benson and from the rosary-fingering Irish peasantry to the journalism of “Beach­comber”, Orwell rarely misses a chance to let some Catholic institution or celebrity have it with both barrels.

Taylor closes with another story that he thinks Brennan (who has also written a study of Evelyn Waugh and is editor of some of the CWEW volumes) might have used. This involves a meeting arrranged by Anthony Powell between Orwell and Alick Dru, Powell’s friend from his Army days who was also a Roman Catholic as well as Evelyn Waugh’s brother-in-law. The two did not hit if off, and Taylor believes this may relate to Orwell’s attitude toward a French theologian named Charles Péguy. Taylor might also have mentioned Brennan’s closing of his book on Orwell and religion. In this Brennan considers an unfinished essay reviewing Waugh’s career that Orwell was working on when he died. In the surviving notes, Orwell wrote this as his conclusion: “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (ie. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.” (Orwell, Complete Works, v. 20, p. 79)

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New Edition of Lady Chatterley Reviewed

Posted on January 11, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Peter Hitchens has revisited the 1960 obscenity trial of D H Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This is in response to the reissuance of the novel by Macmillan in a new “deluxe” edition. The review appears in the religion and public policy journal First Things. Hitchens sees the trial as having had a foreordained conclusion because of changes in the law that took place prior to the book’s UK publication as well as changes in public opinion that supported that legislation. He also notes that no leading UK literary figures were called to testify for the prosecution, although it was widely believed by several perceptive readers that the book was not worth all the fuss. He cites the opinion of US author Katherine Ann Porter that the novel was the product of a writer who was well past his prime. She was not called as a witness but her critical assessment, quoted from an issue of Encounter published earlier in the year, was used in the prosecution’s cross examination of one of the defense’s expert witnesses:

When I first read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, thirty years ago, I thought it a dreary, sad performance with some passages unintentional hilarious low comedy, one scene at least simply beyond belief in a book written with such inflamed apostolic solemnity….Nowhere in this sad history can you see anything but a long, dull, grey monotonous chain of days, lightened now and then by a sexual bout. I can’t hear any music, or poetry, or the voices of friends, or children. There is no wine, no food, no sleep or refreshment, no laughter, no rest nor quiet—no love. I remember then that this is the fevered dream of a dying man sitting under his umbrella pines in Italy indulging his sexual fantasies.

The witness, a Cambridge University academic, was unmoved by Porter’s dismissive opinion. Hitchens himself sees little or no literary value in the book and summarizes his assessment of what he deems its worst passage with this reference to Evelyn Waugh:

Almost all the experts were careful to admit that one particular chapter is indefensible. This is the passage in which the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors has a lewd conversation about his mistress with her wealthy artist father in his London club. Imagine what might happen if P. G. Wodehouse tried to write a conversation in dialect among striking coal miners in West Virginia, or if Evelyn Waugh ventured into magical realism, and even then it could not possibly be so bad.

Not satisfied with his comparison, Hitchens then quotes the passage, which is, indeed, rather cringe-making. The new edition is little discussed except for this description of it as

…a sort of boudoir edition, with a turquoise cover, gold-edged pages, and a fiddly little lace bookmark, looking surprisingly like a maiden aunt’s prayer book from sixty years ago. It seems that we cannot be done with this book.

Waugh leaves several comments about the trial in his letters, at least two of which touch on subjects raised in Hitchens’ article. In a letter sent to Ann Fleming during the trial, he wrote:

How I wish I had been called as a witness…to explain to the bemused jury that Lawrence’s reputation had been made by an illiterate clique at Cambridge. He couldn’t write for toffee. He is right down in the Spender class…Why did [the prosecution] not call expert witnesses? (Letters, p. 552).

In subsequent letters, he comments on John Sparrow’s explication of Lawrence’s description of buggery (of which description Hitchens makes rather a meal) in an Encounter article.

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Waugh Collector Named Chair of Huntington

Posted on January 10, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Huntington Library has named Loren Rothschild chair of its Board of Trustees. In its Press Release announcing the appointment, the Huntington provides this description of  Mr Rothschild’s career:

Los Angeles business executive and a rare book collector, Loren Rothschild has been a Huntington Trustee since 2009. Before that, he served for 18 years on the Board of Overseers. Rothschild’s interest in rare books and book collecting fueled his passion for the institution. He has long been a collector and scholar of the works of Samuel Johnson and Sir Richard Burton…Rothschild is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the Board of Editors of the Yale edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson… In 2014, he and his wife, Frances, gave The Huntington a major collection of rare books and manuscripts by Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), considered one of the greatest English prose satirists of the 20th century. [See previous post.] Rothschild is president of Sycamore Hill Capital Group LLC, a private equity firm with locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. His wife is a presiding justice on the California Court of Appeal.

Mr and Mrs Rothschild were also benefactors of the Evelyn Waugh Society in 2017 when they acted as co-sponsors, with the Society and the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project, of the conference held at the Huntington Library last May.

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Penguin Book Cover Exhibit Opens

Posted on January 9, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

An exhibit has opened at the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft devoted to a Penguin Book “modern makeover by designers from the worlds of music, fashion and street art (including Banksy).”  This began in 1998 and is explained by one of the designers, John Hamilton, in an article in The Independent:

The collection of re-branded classics would be called Penguin Essentials: we aimed to persuade new readers to discover these books as well as re-ignite existing readers’ love for them. The brief from my managing director at the time was to ignore everything that had been done before and completely reinvent the covers. This was an exhilarating challenge. I was new at Penguin, full of ideas and felt like I needed to prove myself. I thought of it as a rebirth, a shake-up of a great brand with a long and respected design history.

Evelyn Waugh was one of the Penguin authors whose books were included in the program. Among the others were Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis and Vladimir Nabokov as well as more recent writers such as Jonathan Coe and Zadie Smith. Several of these are illustrated in the Independent story. One of most interesting and eye-catching among those illustrated is that for Jonathan Coe’s novel What a Carve Up which was designed by a team of two Israeli skateboarders. None of those for Waugh’s books are shown in the article, but at least two were redesigned as part of the program: Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust. A bookseller list also includes a 2003 Penguin edition of Scoop in this category, but it is not identified as a Penguin Essential in the company’s own advertising based on an internet search. Penguin has recently replaced the “Essential” cover for Brideshead Revisited with a more traditional design. See previous post. The cover for Coe’s novel has also been replaced, but the fate of the others is unknown. In your correspondent’s opinion, the psychedelic Penguin Waugh covers of the 1970s-80s designed by Bentley/Farrell/Burnett were both more attractive and probably more effective in turning the Waugh product into a unified “brand”. Whether the Penguin Essential covers succeeded in shifting more copies is not stated in the article.

The museum is located in East Sussex and the exhibit continues until 29 April. Also on display for the same period is an exhibit of the work of artist Elizabeth Friedlander (1903-84) who was best known for her Penguin cover designs of an earlier period. Opening times and other information are available here.

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New Book on Churchill and WWII Yugoslavia

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A book published late last year reconsiders Winston Churchill’s decision to back the Communist Partisans in favor of the Royalist Chetniks in WWII Yugoslavia. This is by Christopher Catherwood and is entitled Churchill and Tito: SOE, Bletchley Park and Supporting the Yugoslav Communists in World War II. Although not much reviewed (not yet, at any rate), something of the book’s contents and its potential interest to Waugh enthusiasts can be gleaned from material on the internet. In his Preface to the book, Catherwood, who has written previously about Churchill, counters the widely held view that switching support from the Chetniks to the Partisans was another of his mistakes. Rather, based on research in previously overlooked or unavailable archival material, Catherwood is able to demonstrate that the decision had its intended result of saving thousands of Allied lives (particularly in Italy) by holding down Nazi forces in Yugoslavia. It also had the consequence, conceded by Catherwood, of putting a Communist government in control of Yugoslavia after the war.

In a report on his 2010 research trip to the USA (sponsored by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust: WCMT), which is posted on the WCMT’s internet site, Catherwood also argues  that Churchill’s decision coincided with the position of Evelyn Waugh on Britain’s Yugoslav policy in certain significant respects. This is based on research of Waugh’s papers at the University of Texas and the archives of the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) in College Park, MD. According to Catherwood, Waugh:

…realized the ethnic complexity of Yugoslavia and that the Croats could play a major role in any post-war reconstruction of the country.

The OSS files showed that they, like Waugh, were looking beyond the immediate benefits of supporting the Partisans and had a non-Communist candidate for postwar leadership in the person of one Ivan Subasic who was:

… a leading light in the Croat Peasant Party, in exile in the USA. The OSS, like the British, understood that whoever led Yugoslavia post-war had to be Yugoslav, rather than, for example, the Chetnik Royalists, who were overwhelmingly Serb. A Croat who had genuine national credentials was therefore ideal. As it happened, the British were adopting that view, since Tito, the leader of the Partisan resistance movement, was also of Croat ancestry and unquestionably Yugoslav in his loyalties – the big (and thus controversial) difference being that Tito was also a Communist, and therefore suspicious to many people…To the OSS the advantage of Subasic is that he was a Croat whom the Serbs trusted, and that he was also a Croat who might persuade many in the quisling regime in Zagreb to come over to the Allies. … (And so unknown to Waugh, who also realized the vital importance of the Croats, the SOE, the OSS and Waugh himself were all backing one Croat or another to lead the country after the war…)

In the 2010 WCMT report, Catherwood describes this discovery in the OSS files as a “scoop” that is perhaps worthy of a separate book. How much of this has made it into the book he has now written cannot be determined from information on the internet. But Catherwood’s apparent conclusion that somehow Churchill’s decision to back what Waugh foresaw as a plan that would put a Communist leader in control of the postwar government, even though he may have been a Croat, is hardly to say that his views coincided with those of Churchill on support for Tito. Waugh’s concern was that the short-term benefit from backing the Communists might not outweigh the long-term harm that the party might do to the Roman Catholics in Croatia. While Subasic was included in the postwar government set up by the Allies, he was soon forced out by Tito who proceeded to persecute the Roman Catholic Church as Waugh had feared. The WCMT report may oversimplify Catherwood’s conclusions on this point, and perhaps some one who has read the book can elucidate.

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New Year’s Roundup

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A recent review in The Times of Tina Brown’s new book The Vanity Fair Diaries opens with this:

“Where you see zippy, zesty lesbian Jewesses bubbling with new ideas, I see plodding, ill-mannered, bottomlessly earnest boobies . . . I do not scowl or sneer. It is brilliant of you to have conquered New York.” So wrote Auberon Waugh in a letter in 1989 to Tina Brown, the conquering heroine and editor of Vanity Fair. She notes in her diary: “Jesus. Bron has become so archaic in social attitude, he’s turning into Evelyn. He is upset by the VF success that he feels has driven us apart.”

Brown went on to found the online news journal The Daily Beast, named after one of the newspapers in Waugh’s novel Scoop.

In the online Croatian newspaper Total Croatia News, an interview of its founder and owner, British born Paul Bradbury, who now lives in Croatia, offered this concluding thought about the advantages of living there: If you are a fan of Evelyn Waugh, there is perhaps no better country in all Europe. He doesn’t explain his conclusion but probably has in mind Waugh’s writings on the country in his novel Unconditional Surrender as well as his diaries and journalism.

Finally, in the usual UK year-end reports of New Year’s honours lists, there are also reports of those in the past who have turned down honours. The Daily Mail rarely fails to mention Evelyn Waugh in this category and, as usual, doesn’t disappoint this year either:

Others appear to have rejected honours because they were holding out for something more prestigious. Evelyn Waugh, whose novels included Brideshead Revisited, appeared to fall into this category. He is recorded as turning down a CBE in the Birthday Honours list of 1959. But Waugh, who confided in friends that he saw the CBE as an honour fit only for “second grade civil servants”, was motivated by loftier ambitions. When his friend and fellow novelist Anthony Powell was granted a CBE, Waugh wrote in a letter: “I hope it doesn’t block you from a knighthood. That’s what one really needs.” He was never offered a knighthood but Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time, was – and declined it. See earlier post.

The Guardian also joined the chorus this year with this comment regarding writers:

Honours are, of course, awarded in recognition of significant achievement or service and there can be no cosier embrace from the establishment. So when an author kneels down in front of the Queen and receives a royal pat on the shoulder, have they compromised their independence?…Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Salman Rushdie have not stopped speaking out since they accepted theirs, but many authors have turned down honours – some out of republican principle, others because they were holding out for a higher award. They include: Roald Dahl, CS Lewis, Graham Greene, JB Priestley, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, Michael Frayn, Alan Bennett, Leonard Woolf, Seán O’Casey and Evelyn Waugh.

 

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Helena and the Prayer for Epiphany

Posted on January 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A Roman Catholic website called OnePeterFive has posted the conclusion of Chapter 11: Epiphany from Waugh’s novel Helena (Penguin, pp. 143-45). The post has appeared on other religious websites as well. This relates to Helena’s celebration of the Feast of the Ephipany (which occurs today in the western church calendar). The feast (sometimes referred to as Twelfth Night) marks the arrival of the three wise men in Bethlehem to present their gifts to the Christchild. The quoted passage concludes with this, referring to the three wise men:

“You are my especial patrons,” said Helena, “and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have had a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

“Dear cousins, pray for me,” said Helena, “and for my poor overloaded son [the Emperor Constantine himself, who was still unbaptized]. May he, too, before the end find kneeling-space in the straw. Pray for the great, lest they perish utterly. And pray for Lactantius and Marcias and the young poets of Trèves and for the souls of my wild, blind ancestors; for their sly foe Odysseus and for the great Longinus.

“For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.”

The Blogger also offers this explanation of the passage’s worldly significance:

Evelyn Waugh probably never wrote a more intimate passage for a public audience, as he himself later says in a personal letter to one of his close friends. Helena is also the only book of his that he ever read aloud to his own children–a touching fact in itself.

Waugh was also recently quoted in another religious weblog. This was on the site CatholicCulture.com in an essay by Fr Jerry Pokorski entitled “Expecting Perfection”:

…the expectation of perfection in this life can easily result in another deformity: a malicious refusal to see imperfection and evil. … Evelyn Waugh wrote nearly a century ago:

“It is better to be narrow-minded—than to have no mind, to hold limited and rigid principles than none at all. That is the danger which faces so many people today—to have no considered opinions on any subject, to put up with what is wasteful and harmful with the excuse that there is ‘good in everything’—which in most cases means inability to distinguish between good and bad.”

The quote comes from Waugh’s contribution on the subject of “Tolerance” to a 1932 article in John Bull magazine entitled “The Seven Deadly Sins of Today by Seven Famous Authors.” This is reprinted in EAR, p. 128.

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BBC Broadcast from Castle Howard Chapel

Posted on January 6, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Last Sunday’s broadcast of the BBC Radio 4 program Sunday Worship came from the chapel of Castle Howard. The celebrant was the Right Reverend James Jones, retired Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, and his subject was “Responding to God’s Grace.”  He mentioned the connection between Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited and Castle Howard which was the setting for both film adaptations of the novel. Given his subject, it is not too surprising that references to Brideshead (in which Waugh was also describing the working of divine grace) are scattered throughout the service:

Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead said ‘that everyone in his (or her) life has a moment when they are open to Divine Grace.’ A time when we become aware, in spite of all the troubles in the world, that there is a God and that his love is within our reach…In the closing pages of Brideshead Revisited there are two profoundly spiritual scenes. The first is where the old Lord Marchmain returns with his mistress from self-imposed exile in Italy to the ancestral home to die…The second scene comes in the epilogue to the novel. Charles, Sebastian’s friend from their student days … returns to the ancestral House during the war when Brideshead has been commandeered by the army …  And goes to the Chapel. After years of resisting the faith he has his own moment of divine grace and writes, “I said a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words….”

In the service, this is where the Lord’s Prayer is recited.

Following the Gospel reading, Bishop Jones makes a final reference to Waugh’s novel:

Half-way through the novel of Brideshead Revisited Julia, Sebastian’s sister, laments, saying ‘Sometimes I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.’

The full service can he heard on BBC Radio 4 over the internet on BBC iPlayer which is available worldwide; a transcript of the service is also available on the BBC Radio 4 website, both at this link.

 

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