Evelyn Waugh and personal prejudices

[mme_hardy]

There's a lot to critique about Brideshead Revisited when viewed from the social context of the 21st century, most obviously the suggestion that it is primarily Sebastian's descent into overt homosexuality, rather than the severe alcoholism that is present from his introduction, that destroys his life. There's also Waugh's insistence, in an out-of-canon letter, that Julia must be punished for her life of sin. Quoting Waugh's letter in the link:

Charles has now become a successful painter, largely through the help of a socially established wife. Whether this wife appears in the film or not does not seem to me essential, but there must be an impediment to the marriage of Julia and Charles. Otherwise since Julia’s marriage to Rex has never been ecclesiastically valid, there is no reason why she should not marry Charles and provide a banal Hollywood ending. I regard it as essential that after having led a life of sin Julia should not be immediately rewarded with conventional happiness. She has a great debt to pay and we are left with her paying it.
.

But those aren't why I'm calling you today. The first thing that threw me, as a 21st-century reader, out of BR was the insistence that what sounds like a beautiful Arts and Crafts chapel is vulgar and ugly. That, Mr. Waugh, is a bridge too far. I wonder when the revival of Arts and Crafts happened, and whether it was already in motion before 1950. Not that that would have mattered to Mr. Waugh, far from it.

Comments

[executrix]

I live in a neighborhood where every scrap of Victoriana is greatly prized. It was therefore impossible to view the film of A Handful of Dust in the spirit in which it was intended--it's a nest of Het(ton)shippers, as it were.

And Ayn Rand

[mme_hardy]

Yeah. Somebody informed about architecture -- probably not the bulk of her readers -- would look at The Fountainhead and think, whoa, that building sounds pretty horrible. (To say nothing of blowing up low-income housing rather than accepting the innate compromises in the trip from design to implementation.)

Re: And Ayn Rand

[executrix]

I am pretty much alone among B7 ficwriters in constantly trying to think up "worthwhile mission that does not involve blowing anything up," so yeah, I tend to feel that "this is not tippy-top architecture" is a poor reason for reaching for explosives.

[nineveh_uk]

It's always entertaining to read the words of artists who fundamentally misunderstand their own works.

The revival of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Pre-Raphaelites was really very late. Andrew Lloyd Webber was able to put together his major Victorian art collection because it was massively unfashionable until the 1960s and much later, and even so things like William Morris came back earlier than others. I haven't read Brideshead for a long time, so I don't remember the detail of the chapter, but whatever its precise type it would have been hugely unpopular when the novel was publshed.

[executrix]

There's a proverb: "What the sons wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember." And Laver's Law (I'm too lazy to get the book from the top shelf of the bookcase) says that a style is hideous after one year, embarrassing after five years, cycling to beautiful in 100. (Nowadays the cycle is a lot faster.) Builders thrive on the fluctuating desires to Open Up spaces and have lots of cozy special-purpose rooms.

[mme_hardy]

Aha! I remember Laver's Law, but I thought the time periods were shorter; I vaguely remembered 50 years as the outside. As you say, the cycle is ridiculously fast nowadays; my daughter is irritated by a '90s revival in clothing.

[mme_hardy]

I found it!

‘You see, there’s nothing to see. A few pretty things I’d like to show you one day—but not now. But there’s the chapel. You must see that. It’s a monument of art nouveau.’

The last architect to work at Brideshead had added a colonnade and flanking pavilions. One of these was the chapel. We entered it by the public porch (another door led direct to the house); Sebastian dipped his fingers in the water stoup, crossed himself, and genuflected; I copied him. ‘Why do you do that?’ he asked crossly.

‘Just good manners.’

‘Well, you needn’t on my account. You wanted to do sightseeing; how about this?’

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate patter of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.

‘Golly,’ I said.

[mme_hardy]

And now, with pictures.

https://classicalbookworm.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/brideshead-revisited-the-chapel/

OT

[movingfinger]

Who the *@#$*! thinks animating pixel-tiny dots of lint or whatever the @#($! that is to drift around on a web page page is a good idea? Besides a #@#$! cat?

Re: OT

[mme_hardy]

God, yes. I thought we got over that shit back with BonziBuddy. I'm seeing animated cursors, too. :( Edit: Not on that site, but elsewhere.

Re: OT

[kore]

I think that's a holidaze thing that WP blogs can opt into, I've seen it on some other WP sites.

[lexin]

The website is deeply annoying, but I do love the arts and crafts chapel. Very pretty.

[kore]

WTF should it be all dull grey stone? I love it. Besides, a lot of "dark" decoration people are snobby about happened because of varnish damage, or candle smoke damage, or paint wearing off, etc. etc. (Like the pre-Restoration Sistine Ceiling....)

[recessional]

My favourite story is the deliberate dark shading that many imitation-gothicky-places put in all the corners of stained glass etc with many theology-based theories about why the mediaevals had done that . . . .

. . . to discover when we started properly caring for the original Gothic cathedrals and cleaning them, that this was dirt, and actually the mediaevals liked BRIGHT PURE COLOURS in their stained glass.

[kore]

Yeah, I heard many, many horror stories in art history and drawing classes about how old paintings were "preserved" -- i.e. dirt and smoke residue and grime scraped off, and canvases washed with bleach or lye, and then varnished, and then the varnish getting stripped off later, and then overpainting to "fix" the abrasion from stripping...I had one painting teacher who would get all worked up when she talked about it. I really wanted to be in art conservation when I was younger (not least because you could go study in Italy).

[executrix]

Mind you, I have an actual William Morris coloring book! And I'm not afraid to use it! So don't go by me.

[kore]

I LOVE Morris. Studied his paintings and writings and poetry in one Pre-Raph grad seminar that was really aces. I had no idea there was a colouring book!

[executrix]

There are TONS of WM coloring books, many of them published by Dover and thus pretty inexpensive. The one I have is of stained glass window designs, on translucent paper, so the ones that aren't turned into Christmas cards are going in my front hall to replace the ugly curtains.

I saw today a reference to grownups who like coloring books as "colorists" which I think is funny because then what do you call the person at the salon who dyes hair?

[kore]

There are TONS of WM coloring books, many of them published by Dover and thus pretty inexpensive

REALLY. Okay, now I'm gonna go looking. Those sound amazing.

[vom_marlowe]

Oh man, there's William Morris EVERYTHING now. YEAH BABY!!!!

....I happen to have some Strawberry Thief Liberty of London tana cotton lawn in rich blues, why do you ask? And a notebook. And some file folders. And--but I digress.

[kore]

Sadly I do not recall his choosing a pattern of WOMBATTS, although perhaps there might have been personal reasons.

[caulkhead]

Perhaps the wombatt ate his paints, and he tore up the design in a fit of pique?

[nineveh_uk]

Sounds fantastic! Looks it, too. I'd love to go to Madresfield Court - I'd never heard of it.

[sollers]

Golly indeed. Arts and Crafts it may be but Arts and Crafts =/= Art Nouveau -they are almost diametric opposites, so a very peculiar choice of term.

[recessional]

I am always distracted by the fact that I first came across "waugh!" as a comic-book exclamation of dismay.

Which is apparently appropriate!

[movingfinger]

I think the Arts & Crafts revival started in the 1960's, but it seems to have really begun steaming in the 1990's, at least for lip service. That was when I started seeing replica/fake Stickley. Fashion-wise, the flurry of Gatsby style in the 1970's didn't seem to have much effect, other than littering Sears's home department with fake stained-glass lamps.

[mme_hardy]

I thought the William Morris -- as opposed to California and the trademark quarter-sawn oak -- revival started in the 1980s, but my memory is wildly unreliable. Wasn't there a pre-Raphaelite painting reappreciation then, or was it just me?

In any case, everybody agrees that 1950 hatred of Arts & Crafts is in no way out of synch with the times.

[kore]

I want to say there was a big exhibit in the 80s....yeah, Wiki says there was one at the Tate, but I was thinking there was an American one too, but it's hard to check. There was a big bio of Morris in the 1990s, I remember it because before that there hadn't been one for a very long time. The grad class I studied him in was in 1992.

[that-which.livejournal.com]

I took Sebastian's fall as his more or less giving up keeping up the side since he'd become someone his Good Catholic family couldn't accept or forgive, and maybe that they'd taught him not to be able to accept for forgive. I didn't take it as an intrinsic response to being gay, just to the pathology society created around being gay.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

My reading is a bit different. I think the narrative treats adherence to Catholicism as the only right reaction -- see both the punishment of Julia and the possible conversion of Charles. I don't see any evidence that the narrative treats homosexuality (as opposed to homoromanticism) as anything other than loathsome.

[that-which.livejournal.com]

One of the things that made me very happy about Robertson Davies was that he wrote from the God's eye view as if God actually liked us.

I tend to agree with you that Waugh most likely saw it that way, but I guess I have a separation in my head between what he was seeing and the conclusions he drew. Authorial intent and stuff.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. You've got the author's (inferred) POV, the narrative's (inferred) POV, and your own (explicit *g*) POV. I note that Waugh himself was queer as a blue-and-white Japanese vase at Oxford, and was at least in a homoromantic relationship with the character on whom Sebastian was based.