More.

Put out more flags ...

Certainly.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.

Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited

Older.

He was older, it might have been written, than the rocks on which he sat; older, anyway, than his stall in chapel; he had died many times, had Scott-King, had dived deep, had trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants. And all this had been but the sound of lyres and flutes to him.

Evelyn Waugh, from Scott-King's Modern Europe

Eye-Opener.

Lamb, Evelyn Waugh, 1930

Chapter Seven, in which Lady Cordelia chances upon a chump ... 

Next week the Jesuit came to tea again. It was the Easter holidays and Cordelia was there, too.

"Lady Marchmain," he said. "You should have chosen one of the younger fathers for this task. I shall be dead long before Rex is a Catholic."

"Oh dear, I thought it was going so well."

"It was, in a sense. He was exceptionally docile, said he accepted everything I told him, remembered bits of it, asked no questions. I wasn't happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him. One has to take a chance sometimes--with semi-imbeciles, for instance. You never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there's someone to keep an eye on them, you do take the chance."

"How I wish Rex could hear this!" said Cordelia.

"But yesterday I got a regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed. Take yesterday. He seemed to be doing very well. He'd learned large bits of the catechism by heart, and the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then I asked him as usual if there was anything troubling him, and he looked at me in a crafty way and said, 'Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but you're holding too much back.' I asked what he meant, and he said: 'I've had a long talk with a Catholic--a very pious, well-educated one, and I've learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there mayn't be a good reason for all this,' he said, 'but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself.'"

"What can the poor man have meant?" said Lady Marchmain.

"You see he's a long way from the Church yet," said Father Mowbray.

"But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia, what's the matter?"

"What a chump! Oh, Mummy, what a glorious chump!"

Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited

Critical.

Mr. Comerford documents T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis' meeting for tea at The Mitre in Oxford ...

But members of the Inklings also created a moment in literary in the Mitre almost 80 years ago, when Charles Williams, one of the leading Inklings, invited his mutual friends CS Lewis and TS Eliot, along with another Inkling, Father Gervase Mathew, to tea at the Mitre Hotel one afternoon in 1945.

‘Mr Lewis,’ Eliot exclaimed, ‘you are a much older man than you appear in photographs!’ The meeting could only go downhill after that. ‘I must tell you,’ Eliot continued, ‘I consider A Preface to Paradise Lost your best book.’

Lewis was in disbelief, it is said. He had dedicated that book to Charles Williams, but in it had been highly critical of Eliot. Lewis had once dismissed ‘The Waste Land’ as ‘infernal poetry’ and ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ as ‘pleasantly unpleasant’, an ‘example of the decay of proper feelings’ and morally dangerous.

Only Blanche appreciated Eliot.

Mid.

Waugh, Mid Ocean, 1923

Noblest.

Lamb, Evelyn Waugh, Age 26, 1930

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct, and to refrain from destruction.

Evelyn Waugh

Testament.

How Evelyn Waugh saved the English country house ...

In Brideshead Waugh set out with a similar task. Whilst today the purpose of the National Trust seems to be as an occasional stand-in for the John Lewis Café, it was set up in 1859, with the noble founding purpose of promoting “the permanent preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest”. This project, at its inception, was not focused on the acquisition of English stately homes. It was the work of writers like Waugh who demonstrated that England’s country piles were of “beauty” and “historic interest”. The National Trust Land Fund was created in 1946. It is a testament to the work that Waugh did to re-inspire interest in England’s ancestral seats, reviving a sense of national identity in touch with our history. Each stately home now stands testament to pride at the intergenerational work. 

Swimmings.

Waugh, Ebbing Waters, 1883

The essences. Not the things themselves.

Swimmings of life on the smallest things.

John Fowles

Hilarious.

Lamb, Evelyn Waugh (detail), 1930

Filled with mingled cream and amber,

I will drain that glass again.

Such hilarious visions clamber

Through the chamber of my brain —

Quaintest thoughts — queerest fancies

Come to life and fade away;

What care I how time advances?

I am drinking ale today.

Edgar Allan Poe

Inspiration.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.

These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.

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, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance, our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.

For nearly ten years I was thus borne along a road outwardly full of change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting--and that at longer and longer intervals--did I come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing. My work upheld me, for I had chosen to do what I could do well, did better daily, and liked doing; incidentally it was something which no one else at that time was attempting to do. I became an architectural painter. I have always loved building, holding it to be not only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.

More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such buildings England abounded, and 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 achievements at the moment of extinction. Hence my prosperity, far beyond my merits; my work had nothing to recommend it except my growing technical skill, enthusiasm for my subject and independence of popular notions.

The financial slump of the period, which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success, which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom.

I published three splendid folios--Ryder's Country Seats, Ryder's English Homes, and Ryder's Village and Provincial Architecture, which each sold its thousand copies at five guineas apiece. I seldom failed to please, for there was no conflict between myself and my patrons; we both wanted the same thing. But as the years passed I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain House and once or twice since, the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by hand--in a word, the inspiration.

Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited

Revered.

Returning to a summer classic ...

From Book Two: Brideshead Deserted ...

A party was being given that night in Regent's Park for the 'Black Birds' who had newly arrived in England.  One of us had been asked and thither we all went.  

To us, who frequented Bricktop's and the Bal Nègre in the Rue Blomet, there was nothing particularly remarkable in the spectacle; I was scarcely inside the door when I heard an unmistakable voice, an echo from what now seemed a distant past.

 "No," it said, "they are not animals in a zoo, Mulcaster, to be goggled at. They are artists, my dear, very great artists, to be revered."

Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster were at the table where the wine stood.

 

"Thank God here's someone I know," said Mulcaster, as I joined them. "Girl brought me. Can't see her anywhere."

"She's given you the slip, my dear, and do you know why? Because you look ridiculously out of place, Mulcaster. It isn't your kind of party at all; you ought not to be here; you ought to go away, you know, to the Old Hundredth or some lugubrious dance in Belgrave Square."

"Just come from one," said Mulcaster. "Too early for the Old Hundredth. I'll stay on a bit. Things may cheer up."

Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited

Lunch and poetry from Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg's 1981 adaptation ...

Happy Birthday, Waugh

Evelyn Waugh was born on this day in 1903.

The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited

Enemy.

The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.

Evelyn Waugh

Thanks, Durham WASP.

Read.

Waugh, Moonlight Meadows, 1884

Every day, priests minutely examine the Law

And endlessly chant complicated sutras.

Before doing that, though, they should learn

How to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain,

the snow and moon.

Ikkyu

Happy birthday, Waugh.

Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. 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. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.

Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Thank you, Grandma Chenoweth.

Keeping.

Vanbrugh, Temple of Four Winds, Castle Howard, 1738

More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.

Evelyn Waugh

Swimmings.

Waugh, Ebbing Waters, 1883

The essences. Not the things themselves.

Swimmings of life on the smallest things.

John Fowles