Wander off the road into the estate that is Madresfield and you’ll be met with trees. A line of trees, tall trees, reaching for the sky. Spare and beautiful. Winter.

Or a cascade of leaves, golden brown, that crackle beneath your feet. Autumn.

Whatever season you choose, whichever route you take, there’s a gift here. In the gothic pile, the stunning architecture, the moat of glass. Something to embrace. That’s what Evelyn Waugh did.

Waugh met the eldest Lygons, William (Lord Elmley) and Hugh in the 1920s, while still at Oxford. But it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that a mutual contact gave him access to their ancestral home. And the friendship of the Lygon sisters, Maimie, Coote and Sibell. The years in between had been mixed for Evelyn – his marriage had failed, he lived an itinerant life but the star that beckoned – his career – was rising, he was becoming recognised as the writer he wanted to be. And then he went to Madresfield and fell in love – with a house, and a family.

The Lygons weren’t without their share of trouble. Hugh’s father, the Earl of Beauchamp, whose homosexually was an open secret, was finally outed by his wife’s brother, with little thought for the consequences. There’s some suggestion that royalty was behind it. Whatever the cause, exile followed  – actual exile for the Earl himself, and ostracism for those left behind.

Into this scene came Evelyn. He was a loyal friend, especially to the girls. His support was wholehearted, and endured for many years. He wrote letters, they wrote letters, there was shared laughter, there were visits. Both parties gained. It was a gift.

Was Waugh a social climber? Paula Byrne doesn’t think so. In her book, Mad World, she notes how he denied he wanted to ingratiate himself with the wealthy or to gain influential contacts. What Waugh wanted, what he had always wanted was comradeship, laughter, friendship with liked-minded people. And with the Lygons he found it.

When, many years later, he wrote the work for which he is most popularly known, Brideshead Revisited (1945), Waugh gave back the gift. And gave it back in spades.

The Lygons were talented. Some of them, such as Frederick Lygon and the Earl of Beauchamp had forged careers, had already won their place in history.* But by giving us Brideshead, Waugh brought Madresfield to a wider audience, he allowed an insider’s view. Of the failings, the courage and the challenge of being Lygon. A gift. The gift of Madresfield. Friendship.

Whichever route you take.

Reading

Byrne, Paula (2009) Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, HarperPress
Excellent insight into Madresfield characters and Evelyn Waugh’s younger days

Mulvagh, Jane (2008) Madresfield: the real Brideshead, Doubleday
Broader perspective, touches on the story. Invites more questions

Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited (originally published 1945)
Eminently readable, nostalgic

_____________________________________

* Although arguably due to status, at least in part

© Ellie Stevenson 2009 (text and photos)

I just love this bit of dialogue from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
Cruel in its simplicity.

—

I don’t believe you’ve changed at all, Charles.

No, I’m afraid not.

D’you want to change?

It’s the only evidence of life.

But you might change so that you didn’t love me anymore.

There is that risk.

Charles, you haven’t stopped loving me?

You said yourself I hadn’t changed.

Well, I’m beginning to think you have. I haven’t.

No, no; I can see that.

Were you at all frightened at meeting me today?

Not in the least.

You didn’t wonder if I should have fallen in love with someone else in the meantime?

No. Have you?

You know I haven’t. Have you?

No. I’m not in love.

Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia carries the subtitle Notes In The Margin Of My Time. Scribbling in the margins is a metaphor that recurs throughout the book, and I’m not sure metaphor is the right word because it seems to be literally true that James has built these essays around passages he has marked, and comments he has pencilled into the margins, of his prodigious library over a half century of reading.* For instance, in his essay on Egon Friedell he writes:

I own three copies of the handsome, single-volume post-war edition put out by Beck. My intention was to use one of them as a workbench, and put into its endpapers the notes that have gone into this book. But I ended up defacing my beautiful Phaidon edition, perhaps guessing in advance that my graffiti would be labours of love.

I have just received a vivid lesson in the benefits of writing in the margins, as I spent most of an evening hunting through the 851 pages of Cultural Amnesia for a half-remembered line about (to paraphrase) a lengthy book made still longer by all the notes the reader inevitably finds himself making in the endpapers. I couldn’t find it.

I never write in books, and I detest those who do. In another essay – I won’t try and search for it – James attempts to extrapolate, from notes in the margins, the politics of the previous owner of a certain German-language book he has acquired secondhand. The only thing I’ve ever gleaned from a marginal note is that the previous owner was too lazy to reach for a bookmark. But perhaps James frequents used bookshops with a more erudite clientele.

If you must write in the margins, you might as well do all your note-taking there; once the text has been violated, no amount of gentlemanly self-restraint can restore it to innocence. The lowest form of book-defacer is the one who marks a single passage in a book, then stops; this mark can easily be missed by the future browser as he riffles the pages prior to purchasing.

I own two books like this. One is Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful Of Dust. In an otherwise virgin copy, some fool has used a pen to bracket this paragraph, in which a character passes the time with a game of solitaire – “patience”, as the Brits call it:

Mrs. Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backwards and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated.

I assume the defacer was an English student; this passage is pregnant with symbolic possibilities, containing as it does the actual word “symbols”. But its significance to the larger story is obscure. Mrs. Rattery is a minor character, a bluff American aviatrix who wanders in at a vital juncture in the plot, then soon wanders out again. Her elaborate game of patience has no bearing on her relationship to the other characters; she’s not a schemer or an organizer. Nor is “order [growing] out of chaos” a theme of A Handful Of Dust – quite the opposite; like most of Waugh’s novels, it’s about the breakdown of the old social hierarchies. Perhaps my hypothetical English student intended to use Mrs. Rattery and her game of patience as a metaphor for Waugh-as-writer, although that would make for a rather generic essay; all writers, except the bad ones, establish “sequence and precedence”.

I also have a copy of Graham Greene’s The Ministry Of Fear in which someone has singled out this observation:

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of the nose and mouth, and yet we protest: This isn’t me…

The mark was made in pencil, so I might attempt to erase it, though I’m sure a shadow will remain. Oddly enough, half-erased marginal jottings play a part in the story of The Ministry Of Fear. The hero, who stumbles into a Nazi espionage plot, spends some time in an asylum run by a pacifist doctor. On a bookshelf the hero finds a book of Tolstoy’s, and notices some rubbed-out pencil marks beside the following sentiment:

Remembering all I have done, suffered, and seen, resulting from the enmity of nations, it is clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism and love of one’s country…

The “ignoble” attempt to erase his approving checkmarks is enough to make the doctor a suspect: “This was an opinion to be held openly if at all,” thinks the hero. I wonder if some future owner of my copy of The Ministry Of Fear will think I’ve ignobly repudiated my opinion on the inaccuracy of police photographs?

M.

* This is an awkwardly constructed sentence which I’ve chosen not to rewrite. Let it serve as an inside joke for those who’ve enjoyed James’ riff on Edward Gibbon, where he excoriates that learned figure for sentences even more awkward than this one.

“The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves—the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast . . . indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye . . . knowing we have a secret we shall never share.” [226]

In 1942, Charles Ryder is a middle-aged captain in the British Army during World War II stationed in the Scottish countryside. He organizes his troops to move them to another location by train overnight. At the first light he finds himself unexpectedly billeted at Brideshead, a mansion whose owners he once knew. Told in retrospection, the story begins in 1923, in Oxford University, where Charles becomes friends with Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of an aristocratic family, who is the “most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his arresting beauty, and eccentricities of behavior.” The friendship quickly grows to be a bondage that bears an ambiguously homosexual undertone when Charles is called back to the palatial Brideshead after Sebastian incurs a minor injury during summer. At the time Charles also meets Julia, the standoffish sister who plays an intermittent and enigmatic part in Sebastian’s drama. Through Charles’s recollection of a harsh and acquisitive world that Brideshead is, Waugh, in favor of an emphasis on male friendship, writes that Charles has been in search of love and that he has no mind then for anything except Sebastian.

. . . at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of the grey city. [31]

The metaphor comes to inform Brideshead Revisited on a number of levels. But quickly Charles realizes that Sebastian’s family is overwrought by Catholicism. As his intimacy with the Marchmains grows he also becomes part of the world Sebastian seeks to escape because he has become wary of family and religion. His life is a struggle between what he wants to do and what he believes his church requires him to do. He descends into alcoholism, which the Marchmains denies, for solace. Charles constantly questions members of the Flyte family about their beliefs and even makes light of religion. “Is it all nonsense? I wish it were true.”

Julia Flyte is wayward and obscure. Only toward the end of the novel, after she has begun an affair with Charles and divorces her husband, does she thinks about being a Catholic. She expresses concerns that her behavior has filled her with sin that her mother, who is adamantly Catholic, has born to her grave. Even though she loves Charles, I am not convinced that Charles reciprocates the same kind of love. He is only emotionally in love with Julia because he sees Sebastian in Julia, and that his wife has been unfaithful. For nearly a decade since he sees the last of Brideshead until he reunites with Julia on a ship, Charles bears along a road outwardly full of change and incident (he becomes an architecture painter and gets married to a woman whose words render his bowels shrivel), but never during that time, except sometimes in his painting, does he come alive as he had been during the time of his (platonic) friendship with Sebastian. He indicates to Julia that Sebastian was the “forerunner,” the first person in the Flyte family with whom he fell in love.

I have not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant, Arcadian days . . . every stone of the house had a memory of him, and when I heard him spoken of by Cordelia as someone she had seen a month ago, my lost friend filled my thoughts. [303]

Throughout the novel, Charles Ryder believes that what was is preferable to what is. His platonic relationship Sebastian might have prepared him for his maturing and his later conventional, romantic enterprises with Lady Celia and Julia, but he has lived the time of his life with Sebastian.

If it could only be like this always — always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe. [79]

He is obviously a man who values the past, which is largely made up of memories of Sebastian. His time with him makes up of the Arcadian days, which is part of the title of Book One. Arcadia refers to a pastoral and mountainous region of ancient Greece used extensively in painting and literature to denote a sort of Utopia or a place where life is wonderful.

Brideshead Revisited explores friendship, religion, and reminiscences in life. Book One, which emphasizes on the relationship between Charles and Sebastian, is more poetic and lyrical than the second half, which doesn’t take place until a decade later. Waugh, or rather through Charles, portrays a family divided by an uncertain investment in Roman Catholicism and by their confusion over where the elite fit in the modern world.

351 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss]

This is a strange little book, a tale of bright young things in the London of the nineteen twenties. It is very funny, razor sharp and easy to read. It skims over the surface of life delightfully and on one level it can be read without thinking too much, as you take in the surface glitter and charm. There are no engaging characters for you to empathise with, but that is not a criticism- there are not meant to be. You can laugh at the idiocies and follies of the aptly named characters, who are written as types, without needing to worry too much about them. It’s all too too fun making. The dialogue is absolutely killing, and for somebody who loves to read between the lines as I do it’s a real treat.
And then you start to think more deeply………………
This is an indictment of a society which Waugh was a part of. He has observed the selfish hedonism of those around him and this is his condemnation of them. It is written with the lightest of touches and a smile on his face, but that doesn’t stop him nailing every one of those rich young hedonists, taking them apart with prose as sharp as a scalpel. The bright young things were the gossip column fodder of their day and lived for the moment without considering what consequences that might have for those around them. Their wild parties, drink and drugs excesses and treasure hunts which caused chaos around London were legendary. It was a high spirited and careless response to the old order who seemed to have given them nothing but suffering and chaos. If the present moment was all that they had then they were going to live it for all it was worth and nothing and nobody stopped them until their bright flame burned out with the arrival of the more serious times of the nineteen thirties. This is a fine record of that era, a young mans book, written with savage wit and bravura, but there are also dark undercurrents when you search for them underneath the surface gloss.

O Henrique Raposo diz que legislar sobre a adopção por homossexuais é coisa absurda em tempo de crise. É tempo gasto que poderia ser empenhado na redução de impostos, por exemplo. Mas porque este post trata a problemática da paneleiragem, aqui fica uma provocação para o Henrique Raposo (com quem aparentemente partilho a leitura recente de Brideshead Revisited):

På Foyles tipshylla i London hittade jag ‘A handful of dust’ av Evelyn Waugh. På baksidan står det: One of the twentieth century’s most chilling and bitter novels; and one of its best. Den är tokbra och kylig och otäck och iskall och skrämmande, var tvungen att läsa ut den på två dagar. Den börjar lite småroligt (samma typ av humor som Austen kanske), men blir otäckare och otäckare.

Slutet är försträckligt och galet oväntat, i efterordet visar det sig att detta slut ursprungligen var en novell (The man who liked Dickens) som romanen sedan skrivits runt. Här återkommer det för DLKs bekanta temat ‘livsavgörande högläsning av Dickens’.

“I had just written a short story about a man trapped in the jungle, [...] reading Dickens aloud. The idea came quite naturally from the experience of visiting a lonely settler of that kind and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner [...] eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savages at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them.”

Waugh erbjuder även ett annat slut mer i linje med romanen, först blir jag arg; får man göra så? Jag vill ju veta hur det egentligen slutade!  Men det alternativa slutet är så ruskigt bra att jag måste förlåta honom.

Penguin erbjuder en pedagogisk utgåva med fotnoter och förklaringar till de knepigaste uttrycken (making love betydde t ex något annat på denna tid). Lättläst engelska och snabbläst bok. Detta är ingen bok man äter till.

Last Saturday, the 31st of October, Halloween, Samhain, descent into deep winter and I am playing cricket beneath the Hollywood sign, in the blazing sun.

Beverlyhills and Hollywood Cricket Club

It was a special occasion, Halloween and the cricket match. For many Americans Halloween is a huge ‘holiday’. West Hollywood embraces the festival with a huge street party, the costumes and atmosphere is amazing. LA’s concentration of creatives, make up artists and costume designers makes for amazing costumes. They  create costumes based on Hollywood film  icons- Freddie, Dracula, Snow White, Jason, Toxic Avenger. This year two hundred thousand people took to the streets- nearly as many as Edinburgh’s Hogmanay.  Perhaps the Los Angelinos take to it because it’s an escape form their normally very restrained and puritan lifestyles. 

Hollywood Halloween barely mentions death. But the Day of the Dead, the Mexican celebration on the 1st of Nov is more like it! People build alters for dead relatives. And they stare the future right in its scary face. Here are some pics my pal Martina took from the Hollywood Forever graveyard on the day.

However  Hallow-bloody-ween was not foremost in the minds of the members of the Beverly Hills and Hollywood Cricket Club. Oh no! Instead it was Old boys against New boys, celebrating its twentieth birthday. We played on the clubs original pitch, which is now a dog park, beneath the hollywood sign. It had to be done, didn’t it!  

I’m not massively into cricket. Soccer, I mean footie, is my thing, but I’ve been playing a bit since I got over here. It is the ex-pat thing of becoming more British abroad, that I have been trying, and succeeding to avoid, most of the time. But Cricket is much easier over here. Probably because of the weather and the big open spaces. Evelyn Waugh wrote a story about cricket in Hollywood called ‘The Loved one’.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loved_One
It is a parody of Britishness based on Sir Aubrey Smith, a real life tyrant, public school fart, who lived and bored in Hollywood in the 40’s… Cricket is also set to raise its profile with “Netherland” the book by Joseph O’Neil, which is about cricket in NY during 9/11 and it is set to become “Netherland” the movie soon too.

Finally, I was prop master on a commercial this week. The Director was a radge. Before shooting he’d talk to the actors sweetly, giving them so much confidence. Then he’d sit behind the camera and scream at them. No wonder it took so long to get a good shot, poor actors were frazzled! But I love the prop houses in the valley. Here are some pics from the interior of Lenny Marvins prop heaven http://www.incengine.org/incEngine/?store=propheaven

Lenny's Heid

Chairs hanging out

Ever since Joseph and Aseneth was a runaway second-century bestseller, Christians have been writing fiction.  Some of it has been among the world’s great literature, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Evelyn Waugh’s Helena, and many more.

My recent discussion of The Shack by Wm. Paul Young and its lack of certain heresies (read it here) has set me thinking about Christian novels worth recommending.  While The Shack was entertaining and thought-provoking, it won’t be in the following list.  The books I’m going to recommend have the following benefits: not only are they good novels but they express deep truths about the universe, God, humanity, and people who aren’t professing Christians could enjoy and read them as well.  Here are five, in alphabetical order by title:

Byzantium by Stephen R. Lawhead.  This is a novelisation of the adventures of St. Aidan, an Irish monk who, in the Early Middle Ages sets off from Kells to Byzantium with a complaint about the behaviour of Western clerics on the Continent.  There are Vikings, Muslims, Byzantines, loss of faith and its recovery.  Aidan is very . . . real.  And the Vikings are fantastic (“Heya!”).

The Cosmic Trilogy by C.S. Lewis.  Many people find The Chronicles of Narnia their favourites; others applaud Till We Have Faces as a work of genius.  I’m not sure what my favourite work of Lewis’ fiction is.  The Cosmic Trilogy, however, is well worth a read.  These books centre on the adventures of Ransom, who in the first (Out of the Silent Planet) travels to Mars (Malacandra), the second (Perelandra) to Venus (Perelandra), and in the final volume (That Hideous Strength), the battle takes itself to Earth.  The stories are excellent, the characters compelling, and a whole gamut of “issues” is run throughout this trilogy.

Godric by Frederick Buechner.  This is a novelisation of the life of St. Godric, an Anglo-Saxon hermit in the Middle Ages.  This well-written novel tells Godric’s life, including Godric’s struggles and doubts, his own humility and questioning of his vocation.  It is beautiful and wonderful.

Helena by Evelyn Waugh.  This is a novelisation of the life of St. Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine.  I believe that this book captures the spirit of the Late Antique world, especially in terms of philosophy and religion.  Waugh is not trying to make a historical reconstruction but simply telling the legend of St. Helena’s life.  I believe this is a masterpiece; it was Waugh’s favourite of his works.  Loyola Classics has a snazzy edition out.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.  This, along with its companion novels, is among my favourite books.  It is a type of science fantasy, if such a genre exists.  It is about four children who set out across the universe to fight the Dark and to find their missing father; the Dark is taking over planets, extinguishing stars.  Their greatest weapon in the fight against the Dark?  Love.

Christian fiction I want to read:

All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams

Brenden by Frederick Buechner

The Pendragon Cycle by Stephen R. Lawhead (I’ve only read Taliesin)

The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

The Psychomachia by Prudentius

What Christian novels do you recommend?

I’m woefully behind on this, but it fascinates me too much to ignore. Daily Routines – a Web site oddly enough about daily routines – has a collection of the writing habits of authors. Beware. You may spend a good hour reading these. (It reminds me of when I saw Shelby Foote speak in college. He told the audience that he was a late riser and always watched Days of Our Lives before writing.)

Kingsley Amis

INTERVIEWER
Do you have a daily routine?

AMIS
Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. That’s probably about ten-thirty, still in pajamas and dressing gown. And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like and go and shave and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a cup of tea turns up, and then it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative afflatus, but saying, “Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense again.”

The Paris Review, Winter 1975

Truman Capote

INTERVIEWER
What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

CAPOTE
I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

The Paris Review, Issue 16, 1957

Pauline Kael

Pauline kept a notepad at her bedside and scribbled in the middle of the night. At dinner, among friends, she would suddenly dive into her bag and retrieve the pad, attacking it with a mysteriously sharpened little pencil, writing down sentences while laughing at the conversation going on around her. The first drafts of her reviews were composed very rapidly. She was tiny (about five feet), and would gather up her weight and lean on a tilted architect’s table, writing in pencil on unlined paper. After a while, she’d get up to walk or dance around the room, only to return to the table and to an activity that was as much physical as intellectual. Fearing that she would end up a secretary, she never learned to type, so after she finished a review her daughter, Gina James, would run it through the typewriter while Pauline took a break, drinking a little watered wine, or talking to a friend on the telephone. Then, staring at the piece in horror and exclaiming at her own ineptitude, she would immediately begin tearing it apart, scissoring and recombining the paragraphs, writing in new observations and jokes in the margins or above the lines, at which point the piece would be typed again. The process continued without interruption at the office where, like Proust after an injection of caffeine, she would assault the galleys, rearranging and rewriting, adding and subtracting still more jokes–on and on, until the pages were reluctantly yielded to the press.

The New Yorker, September 17, 2001

Ernest Hemingway

INTERVIEWER
Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?

HEMINGWAY
When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

The Paris Review, Issue 18, 1958

Update: From Walker Percy’s Lost In The Cosmos: “Graham Greene, albeit a Christian, was observed by Evelyn Waugh to perform a curious rite before he could get to work. He went out to the street and watched the stream of traffic. When asked what he was doing, he replied that he was waiting for a particular combination of numbers to turn up on a license plate – 777. When it did, he went cheerfully to his writing desk.”

Daily Routines: Writers
Science Fiction Novelists Reveal Their Daily Writing Routines – Writers – io9

On October 28:

1510 Francis Borgia, Spanish duke and Jesuit priest was born.

Saint Francis Borgia. He is depicted performing an exorcism in this painting by Francisco Goya.

1538 The first university n the New World, the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino in the Dominican Republic, was established.

1664 The Duke of York and Albany’s Maritime Regiment of Foot, later to be known as the Royal Marines, was established.

1697 Canaletto, Italian artist, was born.

1846 Georges Auguste Escoffier, French chef, was born.

1848 The first railway in Spain – between Barcelona and Mataró – wass opened

1886 President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty.

1890 New Zealand’s first Labour Day celebrations took place.

1893 Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Pathétique, received its premiere performance in St. Petersburg.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky by Nikolay Kuznetsov, 1893

1903 Evelyn Waugh, English writer, was born.

1914 Jonas Salk, American biologist and physician, was born.

1918 Czechoslovakia was granted independence from Austria-Hungary.

1927 Dame Cleo Laine, English singer. was born.

1929 Joan Plowright, English actress was born.

1941 Hank Marvin,lead guitarist for The SHadows, was born.

1942 The Alaska Highway (Alcan Highway) was completed through Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska.

1946 Australian politician, former leader of the Liberal Party, John Hewson, was born.

1948 – Swiss chemist Paul Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the insecticidal properties of DDT.

1954 The modern Kingdom of the Netherlands was re-founded as a federal monarchy.

1955 Bill Gates, American software executive, was born.

1960 Landon Curt Noll, Astronomer, Cryptographer and Mathematician: youngest to hold the world record for the largest known prime 3 times, was born.

1965 Nostra Aetate, the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions” of the Second Vatican Council, is promulgated by Pope Paul VI; it absolves the Jews of the alleged killing of Jesus, reversing Innocent III’s 760 year-old declaration.

1967 Julia Roberts, American actress, was born.

1970 Gary Gabelich set a land speed record in a rocket-powered automobile called the Blue Flame, fueled with natural gas.

1970 Britain launched its first (and so far, only) satellite, Prospero, into low Earth orbit atop a Black Arrow carrier rocket.

1982 Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) won elections, leading to first Socialist government in Spain after death of Franco.  Felipe Gonzalez became Prime Minister-elect.

2007 Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner became the first woman elected President of Argentina.

Sourced from NZ History Online and Wikipedia.

Håller på att avsluta den läsvärda “Mad World”, biografin om Evelyn Waugh “and the secrets of Brideshead”, om den engelske författarens EW:s vänskap med adelsfamiljen Lygon som blev hans inspiration till “En förlorad värld” (“Brideshead revisited”). En bra biografi lyckas verkligen levandegöra till och med en sedan länge död och kanske till viss del bortglömd  person som E.W men också en familj och en förgången tidsera på ett intimt, nyanserat sätt. Först nu fattar jag att Mad World syftar på Madresfield, slottet där E.W hängde som ung och som senare blev Brideshead i boken. Under andra världskriget blev engelska slott och herresäten ofta upplåtna till armén eller tilläts förfalla men Madresfield behölls in tip top shape under hela kriget, trots enorma omkostnader för underhåll. Det  fanns dock ett skäl till detta; om situationen i London blev riktigt illa, eller om England invaderades av Hitler skulle slottet bli bostad (eller gömställe) åt vad som fick fick kodnamnet “two sisters from the tower” – nämligen Elizabeth, tronföljaren, och hennes lillasyster Margaret. (Inte dom på bilden dock.)

Evelyn Waugh (1903—1966) is one of my favorite comic novelists.  His prose is clean and elegant and tempered—which takes his cynicism and savagery to a level that few satirists, if any, have ever achieved.  (At the moment, Saki’s the only other author that comes to mind.)   Sadly, Waugh’s not too well known in America.  And most of those who do know of him, it seems, know him best for his most famous book, Brideshead Revisited, which (coincidentally or not) also happens to be one of his least comic novels.  It’s not much of a comedy at all, really. Which is why it might be, given his incredible gift for satire, my least favorite of his early works.  Regardless of its great literary merit.

The real money books, in my opinion, are four that he published prior to BR:

• Decline and Fall (1928)
• Black Mischief (1932)
• A Handful of Dust (1934)
• Put Out More Flags (1942)

With Decline and Fall being the best of the four, and A Handful of Dust as the close second.  (Though Put Out More Flags, however terribly it fails as a novel, may be his funniest.)

Here’s the thing about Waugh’s humor, which may explain why it’s more appreciated in England than it is in America: it’s plain cruel.  It’s unabashedly mean.  It’s downright vicious.  While none of his characters are ever completely innocent, half of them are inevitably and unjustly tripped up—even killed—by bizarre circumstances, while the remaining half treat the pains of the former half with either aristocratic indifference or, better, something akin to mild amusement mixed with distaste.  Take an early scene in his first novel, Decline and Fall, for example.  Set in a second-tier English public boy’s school, the students are herded about, forced to participate in “sport” before their aloof upper-class parents, by a band of idiot schoolmasters.  One of those teachers, the wheedling Mr. Prendergast, drunk off one drink, is given the role of Starter—which he carries out using not a starting pistol, but an old WWI service revolver:

“I shall say, ‘Are you ready? one, two, three!’ and then fire,” said Mr. Pendergast.  ”Are you ready?  One”—there was a terrific report.  ”Oh, dear! I’m sorry”—but the race had begun.  Clearly Tangent was not going to win; he was sitting on the grass crying because he had been wounded in the foot by Mr. Pendergast’s bullet.  Philbrick carried him, wailing dismally, into the refreshment tent, where Dingy helped him off with his shoe.  His heel was slightly grazed.  Dingy gave him a large slice of cake, and he hobbled out surrounded by a sympathetic crowd.

“That won’t hurt him,” said [Tangent's mother,] Lady Circumference, “but I think some one ought to remove the pistol from that old man before he does anything serious.”

“I knew that was going to happen,” said Lord Circumference.

“A most unfortunate beginning,” said the Doctor.

“Am I going to die?” said Tangent, his mouth full of cake.

“For God’s sake, look after Prendy,” said Grimes in Paul’s ear. “The man’s as tight as a lord, and on one whisky, too.”

“First blood to me!” said Mr. Predergast gleefully.

“The last race will be run again,” said Paul down the megaphone.  ”Starter, Mr. Philbrick; time-keeper, Mr. Predergast.”

It would be one thing if poor Tangent were only shot on the foot.  But as the novel runs its course, we’re given updates on his state of his appendage—which runs from “grazed” to “infected” to “gangrenous” to “in need of etherless amputation” (cut to a scene where two characters are peevishly annoyed by the incivility of Tangent’s shrieks as his leg’s being sawed off in the nearby infirmary).  Until, finally, near the end of the novel, we read a cast-off reference to the boy’s cold, whimpering death.

In these early novels, Waugh’s characters roughly fall into two categories: scoundrels and idiots.  The most glorious example of the former—a character which may, arguably, be the most hilarious scoundrel ever—is Basil Seal, who features as a main character in both Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags.  I could write (and probably should write) a full post on why I think Basil Seal deserves the prize for “biggest bastard in English literature,” but I’ll only say this: any character that comes home to England in good spirits after discovering that, during his last African meal, he unwittingly dined on the woman he’d been making love with for the past year, and then unrepentantly uses the paranoia of pre-WWII England to frame an old friend as a fascist for the sake of gaining a cushy promotion to Captain and taking over the same friend’s spacious and well-located London apartment, deserves some special recognition.

Really, how did Waugh think up such scenes, such swine?  And how did he make them, in addition to being dark, funny, and dynamic—so living?

I think the answer lies in Waugh himself.

When I took Ethics in college, to illustrate why tempered philosophers feel confident in their ability to define and outline guidelines for the best to live among all ways of living, a professor once asked our class: “In medicine, do we think a doctor who’s suffered malaria is better at treating patients with malaria?”  The obvious answer: No, he isn’t.  If both are trained equally, and given access to the same medicine, it makes no difference.  Same, it goes, with the philosopher of morality: one doesn’t need to have lived heinously to decry what constitutes a heinous mode of living.  A variation of this question is also, on occasion, asked of writers: “In literature, does an author need to experience x to write on the subject of x.”  Here it gets a bit tricky.

The author, if he’s doing things right, I think, creates a world atop a world.  There’s the first world, the foundation.  In this world rests images and tastes and touch: the setting.  But more than just the setting: all inanimate objects that are used or made or destroyed throughout the story.  Atop this layer, and interacting with the bottom layer, is the world of characters.

Now the bottom world is something that I feel can be conjured up, in many cases, if the author’s imagination is good, from thin air.  In this case, to answer the question, “Does the author need to experience x to write on the subject of x?” I would say, probably, if the author is any decent: no, probably not.  Kafka wrote about America without traveling to America.  H.G. Wells wrote “The Land of the Blind” without either a) being blind, or b) traveling through the Andes.  Borges built his Library of Babel using nothing but imaginative extrapolation.

On the other hand, creating and sustaining character is something much different.  Returning quickly to Borges: somewhere (I forget where), he wrote that authors can do anything but create a believable character that’s either more intelligent or having more expansive a morality as the author himself.  I like this notion of morality and intelligence as both vessels—measurements of authorial capacity.  I think Borges, in making this connection, was spot on.  It explains for me, having gotten to know a bit about Waugh’s personal life, how Waugh can write like Waugh.

It also, I think, goes further—to explain why some of the greatest writers and artists are also some of the world’s absolute worst people.  I don’t need to bore you with a list of malcontents and degenerates that top the ranks.  Too many to mention.   Just consider this: Borges doesn’t confine his morality to one morality; rather, he implies that the souls of all men may be open to any number of varying moral systems—systems which might (echoing Nietzsche, maybe), be in conflict with one another, at any given time, within the prison of one man’s soul.  As a person, one’s capacity to harbor varying moralities may inevitably lead to disastrous results—but as an author, this capacity allows one the ability to tap into both the highest and lowest modes of human behavior, keep those modes in play throughout an extended period, and play the modes off one another.  In short, for the author, discounting the effects it may have upon his personal life, it’s a clear boon.

What I’m getting around to (sluggishly) is this: maybe the ability to write comedy well is, in some ways—to affirm Woody Allen’s observation that the capacity to write good humor seems more akin to a freak genetic mutation than a skill—inherent: it’s all from the comic’s unconscious jumble of rivaling systems of morality that bump and collide off each other, all while constantly referencing—neurotically keeping at the fore of one’s mind—a deep sense of what constitutes the conventional morality of the day.

So how does this tie back to Waugh?

Well, honestly, this was all just a tedious setup to a strong film recommendation: whether you know Waugh or not, I strongly suggest you watch this hilarious BBC documentary that I recently watched on YouTube.  It’s a multi-generational biography of the Waugh family—a full four (possibly five) generations of brilliant, strong, witty writers, with Evelyn—both the best of them all, and the biggest bastard of them all—at the very top of the pack, in terms of talent.  I think it does an excellent job at illustrating, by showing the complex and often paradoxical nature of Evelyn’s character, how Waugh wrote like Waugh.

Edmund Crispin [Robert Bruce Montgomery] – Best Tales of Terror (Faber and Faber, 1962)

Edmund Crispin – Introduction

Ray Bradbury – The Emissary
Evelyn Waugh  – The Man Who Liked Dickens
L. P. Hartley – A Summons
L. T. C. Rolt – The Mine
John Collier – Bird of Prey
Roald Dahl – Royal Jelly
Robert Aickman – Ringing the Changes
John Metcalfe  – Mr. Meldrum’s Mania
Elizabeth Jane Howard – Three Miles Up
J. G. Ballard – Manhole 69
James E. Gunn – The Misogynist
Ray Bradbury – The Next in Line

thanks to allthingshorror for reminding me of this one’s existence

I found this remark from George Orwell on Evelyn Waugh, ‘He’s about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions.’

That’s not bad, considering they were both brilliant, living writers working on opposite sides of the fence, and considering the search term I used was ‘Jennifer Aniston naked.’ I wonder how the equivalent expression would come out today.

College is all about time management.  Since we’re not actually in class for 7 hours a day or attending extracurricular activities directly after school anymore, I always want to just relax during between classes.  But this kind of thinking is how I, and many other Jumbos, end up in late night until the reading room closes.

Despite the inevitable procrastination spent on Facebook etc (latest obsession: Mylifesisaverage.com, which should really be called MyLifeisAwesome!), I thought that I’d been pretty good about time management.  Sometimes I have to sacrifice a bit work/sleep/socializing, like when I stayed up until 4 am Friday night listening to music and learning to Salsa with a friend, to the detriment of my sleep schedule and next day’s productivtiy, for example, or when I didn’t go to ICruise the next night so that I could catch up on said work and sleep, but overall, I get a good mix of all three.

But I recently realized that to achieve that balance between working, sleeping, and socializing, I lost something else: one of my (formerly) favorite hobbies – reading.

Call me a nerd if you will, but I used to spend hours just reading.  Once I got engrossed in a good book, I didn’t emerge until I finished.  And when I was brought, cruelly and (on my part) very reluctantly, out of those literary worlds, the characters’ realities had become my own.  When they were sad in book-world, I was sad in the real world.  When they were laughing, I would find myself giggling too.

But since getting to college, and getting wrapped up with classes and friends and extracurriculars, I stopped reading.  I still read for classes, of course, (and hundreds of pages weekly at that), but I stopped reading for the sheer enjoyment of it.  I wasn’t alone, so I resigned myself to accepting that I wouldn’t do much reading during my semesters at Tufts…until last night, that is.

I was in the library anyway, so I picked up a couple of books – Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Garden of Eden, and Isabel Allende’s La Casa de los Espiritus.   Rather than waste a few more hours and brain cells on Facebook, I got halfway through The Garden of Eden – and it was the perfect end to the weekend.

Bedtime reading should be required

I read two books by Evelyn Waugh on holiday, A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. Both were to be found in Trezza’s luggage. I was carrying Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, a tale of incredible Spanishy-type picaresques set in the author’s native California, and an absolute waste of writing talent. Tortilla Flat, so it says on the cover, is Steinbeck’s fourth novel and breakthrough work. I find that amazing. It’s only just about readable: even under such ideal conditions as a beach holiday I abandoned it half-way through, and Trezza gave it a lot less time than that. It’s all show and tics and gimmicks, as nourishing as candy floss, absolutely not worth a thing. It’s quite something to think that Steinbeck went on to write a classic like The Grapes of Wrath. My other choice was Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad. I took this in an autodidactic spirit. I never read popular history and now I know why – though I certainly learned facts and was given the odd insight into Hitler and Stalin’s respective idiosyncratic disregards for human life, there was little pleasure in the learning, there was no style in the writing whatsoever; an everyday obituary in the Telegraph is a better read. So, thank goodness Trezza had packed her books better than me. As soon as she had giggled her way through A Handful of Dust, the Beevor skidded its way to join Steinbeck across the floor of the pension.

I had read Waugh before, but not much, and I had not really tuned into what a fine writer he is. He is stylised, but it is not at the expense of substance, rather, it’s in the service of it. A Handful of Dust begins as a great comedy and descends with genuine pathos into tragedy. Brideshead is tragedy all the way, but the comedy remains accomplished and the prose fizzes off the page; it’s the rhythm and the verve of the writing that are the real hook, the same attributes that I loved in The Catcher in the Rye when I read it on the top of the bus thirty years ago. Both books work because of how they sound, because of the voice, as it’s called; a writer who sounds authentic can tell you anything and take you anywhere.

In an introduction that is a later addition to the Penguin Classic edition, Waugh remarks that Brideshead is the book from which critics tend to mark his decline. That is exactly the tone of tired and weary insight that illuminates the text itself.

Nabakov split prose writers into a and b types. The a types are tellers of stories, the plotters; the b types are users of language, the artists. Waugh has that rarest gift – he is both a and b. On this holiday I became a dedicated fan. I became a fan in a way that I could not possibly have done in 1981, when the (faithful to the book) John Mortimer-scripted television series was first shown (it was made by the commercial station Granada, incidentally : imagine that now; we are currently watching the episodes on ‘Watch Again’ through some miracle gizmo on the widescreen). In 1981 I was a Socialist and a Punk and I puked at the sight of the ‘Brideshead Revisited’ trailers, full, as they were, of fairies farting about with teddy bears in the shadows of country piles – there was no chance of me giving such (privileged, corrupt, upper class) horseshit any of my valuable time whatsoever. It seemed to me that the whole production was some sort of covert endorsement of, and advertisement for, Thatcherism.
To slightly misquote one of the my favourite lines in the book, in which the central character (& narrator), Charles Ryder, considers the state of a dead friendship (of the type with which we are all familiar), my reaction to Waugh’s material was quite the same: Waugh (or anything like Waugh) and Foster, S, were locked into, ‘the centripetal forces of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar spaces between them.’

Happiness.

The world wants it.

You say you want it.

But do you? Do you really?

Do you dare?

Are you willing to do what must be done to win the glittering prize of happiness?

Undergo any trial? Endure any sacrifice. Pay any price?

Wow! You mean it? Man, not me! Why go to a lot of trouble when the secret to perfect bliss is as close as your nearest bookmonger? I refer to any of the dozens of gladness-inducing works of P. G. Wodehouse. His Wooster and Jeeves stuff is the best, in my considered opinion, but anything by Wodehouse — whom jokester Evelyn Waugh himself called “The Master” — will do.

With a Bertie Wooster novel (or story collection) in hand, a plump pillow at neck, and trained cats at your beck and call, the world is your oyster. The Bluebird of Happiness has settled in for a longish visit.

Leave it to others to climb the Himalayas for guroid advice. You, scrunch down with Right Ho, Jeeves or Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit and read your way to a good night’s sleep, untroubled dreams, a fresh mind upon waking, confidence in you capabilities, a spring in your step, a gleam in your eyes (and teeth), a mien bordering on arrogance, an insouciant barking laugh, an impregnable optimism, a cheerful tune on your lips, and pocketsful of coin to spend as your warbling heart desires. This I guarantee.

If you don’t believe me, take the 7 day challenge: Begin by self-administering the Beck Depression Inventory test. During the week immediately following the BDI, read Wodehouse for one half hour nightly before retiring. Finally, re-adminster the Beck Depression Inventory. If your score hasn’t plummeted to the single digits — or even mere fractions of one — well, sorry: you are doomed: Study Kierkegaard. Read Epictetus. Take in a nice Igmar Bergman movie. Pout. Moan. Kvetch. Mewl.

But even now all is not necessarily lost. In the unlikely case Wodehouse fails to cheer, try the backup author: Waugh. Read Scoop and call me in the morning

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit
by P. G. Wodehouse
(Overlook Press, Hardcover, 231pp.)

Right Ho, Jeeves
by P. G. Wodehouse
(Penguin Books, Paperback, 256pp.)

Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh
(Back Bay Books, Paperback, 336pp.)

Have you ever looked at Christian fiction?  Every other book has some girl in a bonnet and some guy wearing an old-fashioned frontier-style hat.  Practically all of the rest involve something super-natural- usually armageddon.  None of them engage secular difficulties on secularism’s turf.  Their themes seem almost childish.  Let me give you an example from the most popular Christian series, the Left Behind series.

Think of Buck Williams, played by Kirk Cameron (I told you he’d be back) in the movie.  What do we know about Buck?  Well, we know he’s an intellectual- he attended Princeton- we know he’s a world reknowned journalist and a senior writer for something bigger than the NYT.  And we know he’s not a Christian.  This point is critical to Buck’s development.  You see, when the rapture happens, Buck starts to doubt his atheism.  He begins to put pieces  (including a miraculous experience he had in Israel) together and finally decides to accept God.  Oh, one more thing we know about the pre-rapture Buck: he’s a virgin.

That’s right: a handsome, successful, famous, non-Christian, 29 year old intellectual is a virgin.  We know this because at one point he has a comical discussion about “experience” with a college student he’s sweet on.   I couldn’t get over this when I read the first book, probably a decade ago.  Even at 12 it seemed preposterous (now it’s almost unfathomable).  What were they trying to pull, I wondered?

Now, older and wiser, I’ve figured it out: they were trying to create their own world, totally detached from the secular world, where the ordinary and the sinful were pretty rare and easily dealt with.   Even the obvious evil in the story fits this mold: Armageddon isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence.   Practically all of modern, conservative Christianity has disappeared into that make-believe world.  Thus the Amish books, and the bonnets and the strapping young lads with suspenders and impeccable manners.  It’s all a retreat.

How did we get here?  Bear with me but I think I have an idea.  Back when Christianity still dominated the intellectual landscape, the Christian novel read a lot differently.  Sinners showed up more often but they played an almost uniform role: they died.  Or they experienced some unthinkable tragedy.  You’d see plots that went something like this “girl is seduced away from virtue and soon afterward she’s…run over by a wagon”.  Do you see?  If you have sex outside of marriage you WILL be run over by a wagon.  This was serious stuff.  The virtuous were very good and the sinners very bad.  This wasn’t, by the way, just a literary thing.  Not a whole lot of people were literate and most of those who were only had time for the Bible.  But, it was a way of telling morality stories- even orally- that passed into the culture.

As society opened up, something happened.  The faithful realized that you didn’t automatically die after pre-marital sex.  They noticed that , you know, the virtuous didn’t always triumph.  And the virtuous didn’t always seem to be the virtuous- some Christians seemed rotten and some “sinners” seemed like basically decent people.  So you get novels like the Scarlett Letter.  Chillingsworth is essentially faithful, but clearly evil.  Hester and Dimmsdale are tormented, but their torment is more about shame of sin than sin itself.  We’re led to feel that, whatever their faults, they’ve basically gotten a raw deal- sin shouldn’t work like that.  So there’s a chipping away of the strictures of morality, but most of the ediface is intact.

Dickens, hardly an especially religious writer, illustrates this conflict and change.  In David Copperfield, the virtuous and patient Agnes prevails and wins David, while the sinful Little Emily ends up “beautiful and drooping” and essentially exiled.  Dickens differs from the prior tradition in that, while the sinful get their desserts, he doesn’t quite call them just.  Little Emily is a tragic, not an evil, figure.  It seems there was no doubt that sin led to “the fall”, but there was some doubt about whether “the fall” made you irredeemable.

Sometime after Dickens, this type of novel almost totally stopped.  People had “tragic flaws” that led to “downfalls” but the arc wasn’t totally explicable in terms of sin.  And the man on the street really knew better at this point.  He wasn’t going to stand for any of that malarkey.  Having realized that sin didn’t work quite as linearly as he’d supposed, he was free from the whole idea.  Oh morality and all that was fine, but basically you just wanted to be a good person.  Anything more serious and you were getting radical.  There’d been an overreach.

Which brings me back to the present (for now).  Where before the Christian writer smote the sinners, now he minimizes them.  Twenty-nine year old, intellectual, handsome, famous guys might be virgins.  In fact, they probably are if God has a plan for them.  Somehow it’ll work itself out.  Again, this is a form of retreat.  But, it’s worth noting- more than worth noting- that there was an alternative to the two traditions- between smiting and false dismissal.  This alternative was exemplified in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.  A few months ago, somebody over at NRO (and I can’t find the quote) claimed that while the love story worked in Brideshead Revisited, the religious plot hadn’t quite come off.  I thought this was incredible and absolutely backwards.

The love story didn’t quite work precisely because the religious plot was so central.  The Brideshead crew just couldn’t live well without God.  The whole second half of the book is based on that gorgeous Chesteron quote:

“Yes,” he said, “I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

They’d wandered but they were hooked and knew it.  They’d wandered because they were hooked and couldn’t stand it.  The novel is full of that sort of idea.  Life is glamorous; interesting; occasionally pleasurable.  But, it’s not quite full and they’re never quite satisfied.  Sin isn’t a demonic monster which immediately consumes every last good sensation, but neither is it a pathetic easily vanquished rodent.  Instead, it’s a real temptation which can feed you but never fill you.  Am I crazy to think that this is where we Christians ought to be going?  Am I crazy to think that this is the way it really is?  We should deal with the modern world manfully and acknowledge that sin exists and, while it cuts man off from God’s grace,  it can come out shining like the light.  But, it is not the light and it will never be enough to keep us out of the darkness.  Maybe the wages of sin is death, though a gradual death with many remissions.

As it stands, neither the first and the last Ford Thunderbird associated with 007 is actually a vehicle driven by the James Bond character.

Thunderbird one has its origins dating to May of 1955, according to Andrew Lycett, when John Stepbridge of Famous Players, engineered a deal by which “Hollywood producer Gregory Ratoff agreed to pay $600 for a six months’ option on Casino Royale, plus a further $6,000 if the project went into production.” Ratoff subsequently converted his option and purchased full rights to Casino Royale (1953).

Characterizing that sum as “paltry,” Lycett states that “Ian decided to bank it immediately and buy himself a keepsake in the form of a big, powerful American car. [He] had seen a Ford Thunderbird in the street and fallen in love with its hooded headlights, chrome grill and sleek chassis. So after a nervous test drive around Battersea Park he ordered a black T-bird with conventional gear-change, overdrive and interchangeable hard and soft top.”

The flyer shown above represents the most recent association between James Bond and the Ford Thunderbird.

This is the “2003 Limited-Edition 007™ Ford Thunderbird.” CIA operative Jinx drove a similar version of this vehicle in the Eon Productions film, Die Another Day (2002). Stated production was set to top at 700, with the owner’s unique sequence number identified by a plate concealed within the glovebox of the car. Ironically, this car, like Fleming’s, has a removable hard top.

“Thunderbird” also became a brand name of sorts as applied to Ian Fleming, himself. In correspondence to friend Evelyn Waugh dated December 3, 1958, and July 24, 1959, for example, Fleming’s wife, Ann, referred to him as Thunderbird. And in another letter, dated May 1, 1959, Ann Fleming signed herself, “Love, Mrs Thunderbird.”

Det är nästan lite spöklikt att precis när man läst om ”The anotated Wind in the Willows” ta upp ”Mad World – Evelyn Waugh and the secrets of Brideshead” (Paula Byrne, Harper, 2009 ) – och hamna på följande passage om hur Waugh såg på sig själv under Oxfordtiden:

”In his heart he knew that he did not really belong there. Rather like one of his heroes Toad of Toad hall, he had a child like quality that manifested itself in acute mood swings between hilarious gaity and sullen gloom.// He was still the outsider looking in, glimpsing, rather than passing through the low door in the wall that opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden.” (Paula Byrne)

Min översättning:

“Djupt inom sig visste han att han inte hörde hemma där. I likhet med sin store hjälte Padda på Paddeborg var han lite barnslig, något som tog sig uttryck i plötsliga humörförändringar där han växlade mellan yster uppsluppenhet och surmulen dysterhet. //Han var fortfarande utanför, han kunde bara se en skymt av, och aldrig helt passera, genom den där magiska dörren i muren som ledde till en hemlig, förtrollad trädgård.”