More Lessons From the Brideshead Generation

This is going to be largely about writing and the process of becoming a writer, subjects which remain of great interest to me in spite of my increasingly frequent desires to leave the realm of literature behind and find something else to do and be interested in, preferably my elusive authentic and intended calling. This has not yet come about however, and it remains my intention and desire for the time being to someday write another book, and more after it. Though I have no longer any hope of having a career as an author, and very little of even producing something publishable, I really can't think of anything else that I both could do, and would be interested in doing. Psychologically this is a very depressing place to be in middle age, as one is left asking oneself the same two questions over and over, the first being Where did it all go wrong?, and the second, increasingly, Was there ever any real hope of things turning out otherwise than they have?

In studying the history of this group of writers I have been referring to lately one is immediately struck by how rapidly they were able, especially in their youth, to turn out a completed book. Waugh's and Graham Greene's 1930s and 40s novels were regularly knocked out in 3-4 months, George Orwell's not much more. 8 months was considered a long time. P.G. Wodehouse, who is increasingly considered as a great writer, was perhaps the model of a professional author in this period, and required even less time to knock out a book. To me the lesson the young writer should take from this, and indeed pretty much the whole history of letters is, get that first book done and out of the way quickly at all costs, and then, get the second one out of the way. After that, you can start to move on. The young American writer who has the misfortune of finding himself trying to navigate the contemporary literary world exclusively through the university system and workshop/ MFA circuit may not ever hear this. First of all, he probably won't understand that if he really had serious literary potential he'd already be employed in some capacity as a writer and developing a readership. As such, he'll be treated by his teachers as an ingenu and told about the importance of endless revision, and grow obsessed with the idea of the airtight, fact-checked, error-free, and ultimately lifeless book impermeable to the criticism of these same. He may also have bought into the idea that the only worthwhile end of writing is to produce a certain kind of masterpiece, and having seen two routes to this end extolled, one of which is pretty much to be a genius, and the other, seemingly more attainable one, being the Thomas Pynchon/David Foster Wallace/James Joyce/Flaubert, etc model, where one labors for a decade or more ensuring every word is in its proper place, by the end of which process our would-be author is well into his 30s and the cultural moment has long passed him by. The process and critique of writing are important, but at a certain point, especially if it is what one is ultimately interested in, so is moving one's work in the direction of getting ready for the press, and any sense of this urgency, or even of much of a connection to the actual publishing world, is largely lacking from the collegiate/MFA system.

The books of the Brideshead-era writers are loaded with imperfections, but they are on the whole smart, vigorous, funny, and oddly personable and accessible. They tended to repeat themselves in their many books, and I'm not sure how profound their engagements with the human condition were, though I do think they approach meaningful insight at intervals within most of the volumes I have read. Graham Greene published 7 short novels, one a year, from age 25 through 31, of which only two received favorable criticism and one, Stamboul Train, had even modest sales (8,000 copies, which in 1932 was a decent number I guess). His second and third novels were apparently very poor, and once he became successful he disowned them and would not allow them to be re-printed. But he finished books and got them to press, and in time he made himself into a writer. Anthony Powell, same kind of thing. Had a well-reviewed, though modest selling, debut at 26, wrote three or four more novels over the next 8 years that showed declining promise, then had a odd lacuna between ages 34 and 46 where he didn't publish any novels (the first half of this period was the war), and then emerged from this fallow period with a volume of his great Dance to the Music of Time sequence (which Waugh and some of their other friends thought was too much) every two years until he was 70. Of course, these guys had money, and connections, and a very different education and upbringing, drenched in literature and art, and moved in a world where writing and criticism were things everybody more or less did naturally, but that doesn't make the lessons on how to become a real writer any less valid.

Another refreshing side of this book is that it is nice to read (not that I can necessarily believe it) some antidote to the relentless chest thumping of the internet especially that technological progress is the greatest thing ever, that scientists and engineers and computer geeks and business owners and such value creators are the only genuine smart people in society and the other 95% of the population is essentially worthless, and certainly nothing without them. Waugh especially of course, fancying himself an 18th century style aristocrat and aesthete, regarded the whole modern project of ever increasing comfort and entertainment and shopping opportunites for the masses to be an unrelieved horror, and in his literary world at least technicians and businessmen and their like are kept in their proper places, both seen and heard as little as possible, and endured only at extremities (Graham Greene seemed to have more respect for doctors/scientists and other types of worldly men so long as they were 1) very accomplished in their fields and 2) of an existentialist kind of bent). I admit, old-fashioned European literary culture seems to me much more interesting and attractive than this supposed super high-IQ utopia that is supposed to have been created in modern America. The internet obviously is an incredible invention, and people who have never lived without it probably won't be able to imagine how anyone ever did so, and it is obviously great for things like buying airplane tickets or checking schedules or looking up one's friends even if one doesn't always quite know what to do once one has found them, or buying books--but then see, for example, before the internet took off I used to have to go to Boston several times a year to buy books that I couldn't find up here, which now I don't have to do, but the thing is, I really liked going to Boston every couple of months to buy books, and the defined nature and perceived necessity of the task ensured that I would do so. I'm not really making my point, which is that in the techno-society our intelligence and experiences seem to move primarily in a certain direction, to put it bluntly an ever geekier, less sensual, less verbal, less aesthetically conscious one, which I hate.

Brideshead Revisited--Part 3

Brideshead Revisited--Part 3 With pictures from the recent film adaptation, which look to be well researched. I was on vacation for a week or so, which is why I haven't posted anything. I didn't take a computer with me, and I'll be honest, I didn't miss it. The last few posts before I left were quite grim. Hopefully it will be at least a couple of weeks before I descend to that state of mind again. Among the many old school delights of Brideshead Revisited, we get one of my particular favorites, traveling in the developing world under the colonial system, such that one arrives in say,Fez, as Ryder does at one point, rings up and dines with the local British consul in "his charming house by the walls of the old town" and carries on such discourse as "the Moors are a tricky lot; they don't hold with drink and our young friend, as you may know, spends most of his day drinking." "I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation...in the last decade of their grandeur, Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was taken for granted, and to salute their achievement at the moment of extinction." This sentence doesn't mean a lot to me personally, and I am not sure that I believe the second part of it is true, but it is stated in a very compelling way, and neatly. The vulgarization of civilization is a common lament of the most cultured people seemingly in every era, but the 30s variation of it had a little more sting than it usually carries because many of the people leading the lamenting were uncommonly well-cultured, and in the case of the English at least were frequently walking repositories of that nation's entire linguistic and literary history and development. Still, I don't have a lot of patience for such snobbery. What do such people expect, to rule unchallenged and unabated forever? Even if their ancestors did build a great nation and create a dynamic culture, after enough generations the multitudes who do not care about this, either native or domestic, will reach a critical mass and force the old regime at least out of its extreme comfort zone. It always happens. The characters in this book always have excellent comebacks whenever they get into arguments. I frequent get into similar arugments, only I never have the comebacks to stay in them longer than 10 or 15 seconds. There is a reference to Popeye on page 221 which I was not expecting, so naturally I thought it was hilarious. Lady Celia trying to explain to a dull-witted American senator at a dinner party that an acquaintance of hers resembles the English comic newspaper character Captain Foulenough. The American doesn't get this, so it is explained that he is something like Popeye. There is a good section in which the extraordinary skill of a barber is described. The excellences achieved by various members of the British servant class under the old system were nothing to scoff at, especially when compared with that same class today, which seems to be constituted of some of the most degraded human beings on the planet. These people really knew how to arrange their affairs. When Charles returned to England after being away from his wife and children--one of whom he had never yet seen--for two years in South America painting and doing research, he puts off going all the way home for another week to keep canoodling with Julia. The diaper-changing, stroller-pushing marmot men of my generation don't even know how to politely decline their wives' orders to get up and feed the baby a bottle at 3am. Have an affair with a woman you encountered on a boat and put off coming home for a week, without consequences? Dream on.

I'm not sure it is in good taste to admit it, but I really have always wanted to belong to a private dining club (I added in parentheses "Not a gay one though", which I assume refers to the prevailing atmosphere in such a club in the book). "I have the fancy for rather spicy things, you know, not for the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis--not that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford." I don't like cucumber sandwiches either, but Miss Mitford in tennis dress with a silver cream jug under the cedar tree, well, I'm all over that. "You are not a young man. You do not seem strong to me...No, I don't want to be trained. I don't want to do things that need training." This is me. I guess I am just very aristocratic. Though I am gushing over these characters' brilliance a lot, especially their fluency of speech, at one point I did write 'Are these people really smarter than middlebrows? They sure think they are.'

When Lord Marchmain returned to Brideshead after many years abroad, it is described as a spectacle, with banners being hung in the village and the houses of the common people decorated. This sort of thing was still going on in 1939? Jeesh. A main character dies at this point. This process is rather drawn out and boring. Being me, all I could think was, Christ don't these people ever have to do anything? The answer to which, by the way is, No, they don't, thank you for inquiring. What is my last item? The priest's art questions ("Would you say now, Mr Ryder, that the painter Titian was more truly artistic than the painter Raphael?") I do know that people who really understand things don't like being asked questions by stupid people who cannot have the slightest understanding of the level on which the superior mind operates. So I don't do it. There are hundreds of clips from the 1981 miniseries all over the internet. I have to say, it does look pretty good. I think it's like 13 hours long though. That would take me 3 or 4 months to watch the whole thing at least. Civilisation also had 13 episodes and it took me 6 or 7 months to get through that.

Brideshead Revisited--Part 2

The twit Anthony Blanche had some funny lines. "I have told Cocteau about you. He is all agog"..."Real G-g-green Charteuse, made before the expulsion of the monks. There are five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue. It is like swallowing a sp-spectrum." I have never had Chartreuse, green or yellow. When I was in my late 20s I had a cocktail book out of which I was going to make and know all the cocktails, much as I keep lists of books and movies and places, all of which, the idea went, was going to make me a brilliant and desriable figure in company. It was a drink calling for yellow Chartreuse that largely threw me off this plan. I scoured every liquor store in my area--due to the state monopoly, this was not hard to do--for more than a month in search of the stuff, finally finding a bottle at a gourmet booze shop in Cambridge, Mass. It was $30--much more than the green by the way, which ran around 12. This was too expensive for me, and I didn't get it. Now I am 40, and I still haven't had it. Would it even be worth it now? Any hope I once had of ever becoming a sophisticated drinker is probably gone. My 30s, that crucial, make-or-break decade in so many area of life, was a wholly lost one to me as far as drinks go. I don't think I added anything to my repertoire in the entire decade apart from sloe gin fizzes, which at one point kept turning up in various media from the 40s I was consuming to the point that I felt I had to have one. But otherwise I don't really have any friends near to hand, certainly none who are anymore who are imaginative drinkers, I don't go to cocktail bars and I just don't have that interaction with people that keeps one in a stream of new experience.

Having an affair, it is explained on page 52, is more or less compulsory at Cannes. I am always on the outlook for sexy spots. No, I can't afford it, but it is often remarkable how little different one feels from someone who can.

p.66 "It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me." This is more my speed. Charles is like 19 here, by which time nowadays if you haven't already had a least a few women quivering under your stare, you can pretty much forget such things happening ever.

"The masters who taught me Divinity told me that biblical texts were highly untrustworthy." Lord Marchmain: "This house seems to have been designed for the comfort of only one person, and I am that one."

Charles (narrator): "I was nineteen years old and completely ignorant of women. I could not with any certainty recognize a prostitute in the streets."

Mr Samgrass (pedant): "She has a birdlike style of conversation, pecking away at the subject in a way I find most engaging, and a school-monitor style of dress which I can only cal 'saucy'." Stuff like this just kills me.

These literary and artistic circles one encounters in British novels of this time period are remarkably complete and self-contained little societies. People like me are forever looking outside themselves, their own environments, to have vitality and self-realization miraculously bestowed upon us. This is a pitiful mistake.

The people we aren't supposed to like in this book, to be honest, seem a lot more interesting than these twits we are supposed to like.

I liked the part where Charles rhapsodizes over the bathroom he used to be given during his stays at Brideshead, and its contrast with the "uniform, clinical, little chambers, glittering with chronium-plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world." The modern world really does stink, no matter what age you are living in (of course in 1945 when the book was published more than 50% of British households still did not have indoor plumbing, but when reading this genre of literature, one really doesn't take that level of society into consideration, so it is not fair to nitpick over such matters).

Along similar lines, I was certainly convinced that Julia was dishy, and I kept wanting more of her, at least in the early sections.

"I need my third glass of port; I need that hospitable tray in the library...I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his." These comments follow on discussions of the Marchmain's declining fortunes. People in books of this class are really into drinking, which I guess I like. It's hard to imagine anybody in them over forty training for a triathlon, or eschewing a second helping of beef.

"...the ball given for Julia, in spite of the ignoble costume of the time, was by all accounts a splendid spectacle." This ball took place in 1923. The 20s generally are my favorite period for fashion of all time, though there was a peak around '22-'25 even within that decade, I think.

"There is proverbially a mystery among men of new wealth, how they made their first ten thousand..."

The General Strike of 1926 provided some good material (Waugh was not on the side of the strikers):

"We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes." I used to know a guy like that. He became very successful in business.

"'You should have been inBudapest when Horthy marched in,' said Jean, 'That was politics.'" Ha-Ha! I love this stuff.

Really though--what a life it was. Was it ultimately empty and unhappy? Was its upbringing, its education, of an inferior quality? Compared to what? At the very least, such unhappiness as they have is not from any desire to be substantially other than what they are. Shame and convictions of profound personal inferiority are largely absent from their lives.

I am tired and am going to close this here. Also I was sick this week, besides my usual busyness, and I'm still coming out of that. Wanted to get a post in though, you know. Hello to all the spamming commentors.

Brideshead Revisited (1945)--Part IProbably because of the popular television dramatization that was made of it during the 80s, which I have not gotten around to seeing yet, I had been aware of and interested in reading this book someday for most of my life. Waugh remains a highly regarded writer in many circles, especially certain rightish ones, to this day, and he was a member of that celebrated generation of English authors that included Orwell, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, and numerous other well-known names, whose careers and writing styles I have often applauded in these pages. I was anticipating a spare, wry, surgical, casually erudite and consistently funny read. I am still not exactly sure what it was that I got; for while it was all of these things in places, there was also an astonishing amount of flaccidness in it, and many parts of it did not hold together at all. Overall while I was reading it I thought it was one the more unattractive portrayals of this milieu. Much has been written about the brand of Catholicism which the Flytes affect. I am not a real Catholic myself, but I didn't like it, and I think it is insulting in some way to the many people, however misguided or ignorant one may think them, who have lived very strictly and sincerely in accord with what they believe to be Catholic teaching. The characters here strike me as being too spiritually damaged, too ultimately comfortable with their behaviors in the past that led to this damage, and not at all transformed by their religious practices in any kind of biblical or medieval sense. It is Catholicism as a purely aesthetic or philosophical entertainment, and adornment. I am surprised the author seems to mistake it for something else because the characters are sophisticated and socially attractive. Waugh himself seemed in later years to regard great swathes of the book with regret--the edition I read actually was the revised edition of 1959, in which apparently the revisions were not minor, the original book thus being even more indulgent and oddly deficient in a sense of being the product of a mature and considered intellect.

Nonetheless Brideshead has always been his most popular book by far with the general public; indeed it may be the only one that is widely known therein. I enjoyed it too though I don't think it is great literature, especially the second half. Still, it is a nostalgic book about a way of life that, largely because of literature, has meaning for hundreds of thousands of people, including me, who have nothing to do with it except at fourth or fifth hand. That is in great part why I still think there will always be a role for this kind of fictional writing, if it is done well enough. Some say the novel is dead, but why should it not come back again? Can any art form be said to be dead absolutely, never to be revived in any kind of interesting new way? The drama, to name one example, has appeared to die any number of times, not only during the entire millenium between the decline of secular high Roman culture and the stirrings of revival with the morality and mystery plays in the late Middle Ages, but between the retirement of Sheridan in 1780 and the emergence of Shaw and Wilde in the 1880s I cannot think of one spoken (as opposed to operatic) drama written in English that is considered important literature now. And the European theater had been almost equally moribund for 30-50 years when Ibsen emerged around 1860. The novel does too many important things better than other forms of expression that have been devised for humanity to discard it entirely. Writers will learn how to employ the medium as real communication to real readers again, and it will suddenly appear as if reborn.

If I am one of this party, a suave London writer up for the weekend, whose desirability to the ladies is a fact long-established, going all the way back to Harrow even, whose bedroom am I going into in the middle of the night once the rest of the house has fallen silent? I guarantee you at least half the people in this picture were total sex maniacs until well into middle age. I'm thinking maybe the second one on the left. The one beside her on her left, our right, looks like she was probably the most good to go overall, but she isn't really my type.


Another surprise, given the affection right-wing culture aficiondos such as the crew at the frequently interesting and always breathtakingly virulent New Criterion often express for Waugh, was what a rather pathetic specimen of a human being the celebrated character Sebastian Flyte turned out to be. Call me American for reducing everything to utilitarian terms, but he is utterly useless. Dissipated. Luxurious. Idle. Whiny. Sickly. He exhausts most of what remains of many centuries' worth of his family's wealth, and does nothing to generate more. At least he doesn't support socialism--he does abhor the vulgar classes and laments their rise--and he was charming in school, which I guess if you go to the right schools, especially in England and France at least, carries a great deal of weight all through life. In Powell there is a similar witty and good-looking school friend, Charles Stringham, that being a product of modern America the reader like me projects into adulthood as being a dynamic fellow in a glamorous position where he is utterly comfortable and revered. In 1920s and 30s England, however, he too ends up, rather inexplicably given his apparent talents, a drunken and feeble loser, though always retaining the affection of his more aristocratic friends.


There is a funny or otherwise quotable line on almost every page of this. I promise I will be choosy and try to pick only the very funniest. This is for example from the Preface to the revised 1959 edition, page 1:


"It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster--the period of soya beans and Basic English--and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendors of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful."


Prologue, p.5 "Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old." Oh God.


Sebastian Flyte of course is famous for, among other things, the teddy bear he always carries around with him. This made a bigger impression in 1945 than it would now, I suppose.


After giving some other reasons for keeping certain overwrought passages intact in the new edition (I have returned to the Preface now) he adds that "also...many readers liked them, though that is not a consideration of first importance."


Book I, Chap. I. Oxford: "In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days--such as that day--when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth." In another writer this might come across as a bit mushy, but Waugh having established himself already as a bit of a crank, it comes off as genuine feeling, and therefore beautiful.


"Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?" I admit, I don't. Why? Because the things of nature are more accessible to me? I think it is because I have been trained to think of really lofty human accomplishment as an incredibly rare triumph, requiring centuries of cultural development matched to the individual geniuses that are the culmination of that development. This is something in which most people have no part whatsoever. Oxford in the 1920s was at the very least much closer to that level of human achievement and possibility than all but the most creative and energetic scenes that are known to us.


"'I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon;' that was enough then. Is more needed now?...Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have left undone or done otherwise." I bet the real social elite still talks like this. Or if they don't, they should.