You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August, 2008.
The Reid twins from Auchtermuchty, Fife. They were told, of course, by record execs to drop the accents…They said “Yurra averra wee man, and are havering on aboot what you dona know” or something quite like that in the Scots dialect. I’m glad they didn’t cave to the pressure.
Now:
Then:
One climbed to the very top of the social ladder, the other chose to live among tramps. One was a celebrity at twenty-three, the other virtually unknown until his dying days. One was right-wing and religious, the other a socialist and an atheist. Yet, as this ingenious and important new book reveals, at the heart of their lives and writing, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were essentially the same man.
Orwell is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, Waugh for Brideshead Revisited and comic novels like Scoop and Vile Bodies. However different they may seem, these two towering figures of twentieth-century literature are linked for the first time in this engaging and unconventional biography, which goes beyond the story of their amazing lives to reach the core of their beliefs–a shared vision that was startlingly prescient about our own troubled times.
Both Waugh and Orwell were born in 1903, into the same comfortable stratum of England’s class-obsessed society. But at first glance they seem to have lived opposite lives. Waugh married into the high aristocracy, writing hilarious novels that captured the amoral time between the wars. He converted to Catholicism after his wife’s infidelity and their divorce. Orwell married a moneyless student of Tolkien’s who followed him to Barcelona, where he fought in the Spanish Civil War. She saved his life there–twice–but her own fate was tragic.
Waugh and Orwell would meet only once, as the latter lay dying of tuberculosis, yet as The Same Man brilliantly shows, in their life and work both writers rebelled against a modern world run by a privileged, sometimes brutal, few. Orwell and Waugh were almost alone among their peers in seeing what the future–our time–would bring, and they dedicated their lives to warning us against what was coming: a world of material wealth but few values, an existence without tradition or community or common purpose, where lives are measured in dollars, not sense. They explained why, despite prosperity, so many people feel that our society is headed in the wrong direction. David Lebedoff believes that we need both Orwell and Waugh now more than ever.
Unique in its insights and filled with vivid scenes of these two fascinating men and their tumultuous times, The Same Man is an amazing story and an original work of literary biography.
“…I’m also given to understand that the rules of science begin to bend and even break at the extremes of the universe’s scale. Down where everything is subatomic-sized, things tend to be a bit random with mesons, leptons, quarks, brilligs, slithy toves, etc., subjected to Strong Force, Weak Force, Force of Habit, and so on. Meanwhile, in the farthest reaches of outer space, matter, antimatter, dark matter, and whatsamatter are tripping over string theory and falling into black holes. God is not like that. He’s famously there in the details, and He is the big picture.
In one way, however, faith in science does come easier than faith in God—if fear is any gauge of how real we believe a thing is. To judge by human behavior, people are not trembling before the Almighty much. But many of those same people are scared silly by science. They are frightened by a climate stuck in the microwave of technological advances, frightened by genetic modifications that may—who knows?—cross cabbages with kings and produce a Prince Charles, and naturally they are frightened by the clouds of mushrooms being grown in the science cellars of Iran and North Korea…”
“…Saki’s stories are funnier than P.G. Wodehouse’s, his satire wickeder than Evelyn Waugh’s, his epigrams more pointed than Wilde’s. Saki devotees include Graham Greene, Noel Coward and Will Self. Once bitten, readers are addicted, but the readership has expanded largely through word-of-mouth. This book aims to place Saki’s work in its literary and cultural context and to reassess his standing and significance.
Saki became the acknowledged master of the short story, and his forms are perfect. His writing is elegant, economical, and witty. The dominant tone is worldly, flippant irreverence delivered in astringent exchanges and epigrams more neat, pointed, and poised even than Wilde’s. The deadpan narrative voice allows for the unsentimental recitation of horrors and the comically grotesque, and the generation of guilty laughter at some very un-PC statements.
Saki’s short stories have been much reprinted as well as adapted for radio, stage and television, but his novels The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came are almost unknown, his journalism and travel writing forgotten, and his plays, Karl-Ludwig’s Widow, The Death Trap and The Watched Pot, rarely performed. His reputation has been unfairly overshadowed by his predecessor Oscar Wilde, contemporary George Bernard Shaw and followers P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.
In a well-meaning introduction to the Penguin Complete Saki, Noel Coward reinforces the received image of Saki’s work as part of a garden party of pre-war light literature; an Edwardian or even Victorian milieu of privilege, luxury, and affectation; of comedies of manners and light satire.
Saki’s writing was no nostalgic evocation of a lost golden age, and he was rarely concerned with charm and delight. His preoccupations, political, social, and personal, were twentieth-century. One was the advent of war, which triggered his self-engineered metamorphosis from cosmopolitan cynic and dandy-about-town to patriotic, even jingoistic, NCO in the trenches.
Saki’s Reginald, Clovis and Bertie may have been the models for P.G. Wodehouse’s young men of independent means and effete habits, but they are not well-intentioned upper-class twits like Bertie Wooster (first seen in The Man with Two Left Feet published in 1917, the year after Saki’s death). They are perhaps closer to the characters of Evelyn Waugh’s satires such as A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938), and may be related to the dandies of Ronald Firbank’s novels such as Vainglory (1915), Inclinations (1916) and Valmouth: A Romantic Novel (1919). The dandyism and affectation of Saki’s heroes might be reminiscent of Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), but while Sir Percy throws off his airs and graces to rescue doomed aristocrats from the Guillotine, Saki’s heroes would be more likely to be gleefully working it – and equally as likely to be constructing witty epigrams as they mounted its steps.
While their heartlessness constitutes much of the comedy, and their bon-mots the style of the stories, Saki’s young men are both to be feared and pitied. Something, it is suggested, has gone awry with their development…”
Quick, who wrote and published this bit of dialog?, spoken casually by a male character to the female protagonist: “You know, you’re the sort of woman who ought to be raped. It might do you good.”
Give up? It was Dame Agatha! Not in her detective fiction, it is from Absent in the Spring (1943), one of the six novels that she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Good Lord, after all the time Agatha and I have spent together…Who knew? You little minx, you…In these novels she writes as a woman and not as the persona “Agatha Christie.”
Of course, I know that you all have your Poirot, Marple and Murder at the Manor and Abroad stacked neatly on your bedside reading tables, as you should, for those sleepless nights which come along now and then. You thought you had her pegged did you? Well, there seems to be a little more to this Grand Dame of Mystery.
Oh goody…Here are lists of things that every Catholic should know. Of course, when I say ‘Catholic’ I am referring to Traditional Catholics and not Modernists. A Modernist Catholic only needs to be able to speak vaguely about peace, love and understanding and try very hard not to be judgmental or hurt anyone’s feelings. They need to be able to dig a guitar mass and sing Kum-Bah-Ya when called upon to do so, or grab the bongos in an emergency. They are quite familiar with the annulment process, of course and judging from the way they dress at their weekly meetings, sloth has been moved to the virtue column on their list. But that’s alright, as long as you feel good about it, you know, don’t worry about what God says, what does he (oh so sorry, she) know anyway…
So, here are the lists…How did you do? Anyone? Anyone?
The 7 Sacraments (The Holy Mysteries)
The 7 Corporal Works of Mercy
The 7 Spiritual Works of Mercy
The 3 Eminent Good Works
The 7 Gifts of the Holy Ghost (& the Charismata)
The 12 Fruits of the Holy Ghost
The 3 Theological Virtues
The 4 Cardinal Virtues
The 7 Capital Sins & Their Contrary Virtues
The 6 Sins Against the Holy Ghost
The 4 Sins That Cry Out to Heaven
The 3 Conditions of Mortal Sin
The 9 Ways We Participate in Others’ Sins
The 10 Commandments
The 2 Greatest Commandments
The 3 Evangelical Counsels
The 6 Precepts of the Church
The Holy Days of Obligation (English)
The 3 Powers of the Soul The 4 Pillars of the Catholic Faith
The 3 Pillars of the Church’s Authority
The 3 Munera (Duties of the Ordained)
The 3 Parts of the Church
The 4 Marks of the Church
The 12 Apostles
The 12 Tribes of Israel
The 8 Beatitudes
The 14 Stations of the Cross
The 7 Sorrows (Dolours) and 7 Joys of Our Lady
The 7 Sorrows and 7 Joys of St. Joseph
The 15 Mysteries of the Rosary
The Order of Creation
The 9 Choirs of Angels
The 3 levels of reverence
The 14 Holy Helpers
The 7 Last Words of Christ
The 4 Last Things (The Novissima)
Joan Greenwood (1921-1987)
A diminutive (5′ tall), strikingly beautiful, doll-like actress, her portrayals both bewitching and provocative…I’m sure you remember her from Kind Hearts and Coronets. Her voice, likened to the sound of someone gargling with champagne, was intoxicating. Exquisite! Simply Exquisite.
It was the voice that set her apart. Husky, plummy, sexy. It cut through her essential gentility and made her seem like a woman of the world even when she was playing it innocent. In one of the most memorable cinema quotes, Karel Reisz described her speaking her lines “as if she dimly suspected some hidden menace in them which she can’t quite identify”.
She was born in London and went to RADA and then did some theatre. In her first films she usually played children and it wasn’t until Latin Quarter that she got her first star role. Shortly after, she signed a Rank contract. Her parts improved but it was Whisky Galore and Kind Hearts and Coronets for Ealing that really put her on the map. Her sexy ingénue in The Man in the White Suit was equally memorable.
Her Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest is the definitive portrayal. Unlike other actresses of the period who made films but preferred theatre, she never gave the impression that she was slumming. She made a couple of films in Hollywood and then retreated to the stage. Marriage in 1959 (to Andre Morell) and children meant that she worked less though she did manage to appear in The Mysterious Island battling against giant crabs and wasps. She also got another good role in Tom Jones.
Her career petered out in small roles in bad films. She turned up on TV in the sea-going soap Triangle as the passenger who never got off the ferry. Triangle was a low point in many people’s careers but she was watchable. She was the mad landlady in the sitcom Girls on Top and looked set for a long career playing old bats, but she died after a fall at home. Before she died she left one great performance as Mrs Clennam in the two-part version of Little Dorrit.
With glowing skin and cheek-bones to die for, she photographed beautifully. Unlike many beautiful actresses, she could deliver wonderful performances. She was mannered, but that never seemed to matter since she chose roles for which her style was appropriate. On the rare occasions she chose a realistic role (The October Man) she showed that she could cope well with its demands.
But she had no time for the Hollywood lifestyle or for American men. About Hollywood she said: “I couldn’t put up with the endless makeup sessions”, she later reflected. “All the palaver of keeping out of the sun, dyeing one’s hair and worrying about the size of one’s bosom”. She found the sanity of Ealing much more to her taste. There “we used to wash our hair in buckets, and we survived on toasted sandwiches, chocolate and soup”.
The Coetus Internationalis Patrum (Latin: International Group of Fathers) was a study group of the conservative-minded bishops at the Second Vatican Council. The members included prelates such as Cardinals Francis Spellman, Alfredo Ottaviani, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and Bishops Casimiro Morcillo of Madrid, Antônio de Castro Mayer of Campos and de Proenca-Sigaud of Diamantina.
It was originally formed after complaints by some of the more traditionalist bishops of the presence of Protestants and liberal Catholic theologians such as Hans Küng, Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) and Karl Rahner.
As a member of the Preparatory Commission for the Second Vatican Council, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre took part in the discussions about the draft documents submitted to the bishops for consideration at the Council. During the first session of the Council (October to December 1962), he became concerned about the direction the Council’s deliberations were taking. Together with several other like-minded bishops, including Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer, Lefebvre established a study group of bishops at the Council which organized lectures by important theologians. Eventually this group became known as the Coetus Internationalis Patrum.
This study group was concerned about a number of issues at the Council. They feared that episcopal collegiality could undermine papal primacy. They thought there should be a specific condemnation of communism. They opposed the reversal of the traditional formulation of the ends of marriage (i.e. listing the good of the couple before the procreation and education of children). They thought there should be a specific Council document about the Blessed Virgin Mary, not merely a chapter in Lumen gentium. Some also favoured a solemn definition of a fifth Mariological dogma, which would proclaim Mary as Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix and advocate for the Church with the Most Blessed Trinity.
Continuing complaints from the group about the presence of Protestant observers led Pope Paul VI, who was “concerned not to alienate the traditionalists“, to ask Cardinal Augustin Bea “if perhaps the presence of the ’separated brethren’ and their ‘mentality’ were ‘excessively dominating the council, thus diminishing its psychological freedom.’ (He) emphasized that protecting ‘the coherence of the teaching of the Catholic Church’ was more important than pleasing the observers.’” After thus consulting Cardinal Bea, the Pope decided not to disinvite the observers.
I admire detachment. I commend a serene indifference to hubbub. I like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac, Darwin, and other sages, for having been so concentrated on this or that eternal verity in art or science or philosophy, that they paid no heed to alarums and excursions which were sweeping all other folk off their feet. It is with some shame that I haunt the tape-machine whenever a General Election is going on.
Of politics I know nothing. My mind is quite open on the subject of fiscal reform, and quite empty; and the void is not an aching one: I have no desire to fill it. The idea of the British Empire leaves me quite cold. If this or that subject race threw off our yoke, I should feel less vexation than if one comma were misplaced in the printing of this essay. The only feeling that our Colonies inspire in me is a determination not to visit them. Socialism neither affrights nor attracts me—or, rather, it has both these effects equally. When I think of poverty and misery crushing the greater part of humanity, and most of all when I hear of some specific case of distress, I become a socialist indeed. But I am not less an artist than a human being, and when I think of Demos, that chin-bearded god, flushed with victory, crowned with leaflets of the Social Democratic League, quaffing temperance beverages in a world all drab; when I think of model lodging-houses in St. James’s Park, and trams running round and round St. James’s Square—the mighty fallen, and the lowly swollen, and, in Elysium, the shade of Matthew Arnold shedding tears on the shoulder of a shade so different as George Brummell’s—tears, idle tears, at sight of the Barbarians, whom he had mocked and loved, now annihilated by those others whom he had mocked and hated; when such previsions as these come surging up in me, I do deem myself well content with the present state of things, dishonourable though it is. As to socialism, then, you see, my mind is evenly divided. It is with no political bias that I go and hover around the tape-machine. My interest in General Elections is a merely ‘sporting’ interest. I do not mean that I lay bets. A bad fairy decreed over my cradle that I should lose every bet that I might make; and, in course of time, I abandoned a practice which took away from coming events the pleasing element of uncertainty. ‘A merely dramatic interest’ is less equivocal, and more accurate.
‘This,’ you say, ‘is rank incivism.’ I assume readily that you are an ardent believer in one political party or another, and that, having studied thoroughly all the questions at issue, you could give cogent reasons for all the burning faith that is in you. But how about your friends and acquaintances? How many of them can cope with you in discussion? How many of them show even a desire to cope with you? Travel, I beg you, on the Underground Railway, or in a Tube. Such places are supposed to engender in their passengers a taste for political controversy. Yet how very elementary are such arguments as you will hear there! It is obvious that these gentlemen know and care very little about ‘burning questions.’ What they do know and care about is the purely personal side of politics. They have their likes and their dislikes for a few picturesque and outstanding figures. These they will attack or defend with fervour. But you will be lucky if you overhear any serious discussion of policy. Emerge from the nether world. Range over the whole community—from the costermonger who says ‘Good Old Winston!’ to the fashionable woman who says ‘I do think Mr. Balfour is rather wonderful!’—and you will find the same plentiful lack of interest in the impersonal side of polities. You will find that almost every one is interested in politics only as a personal conflict between certain interesting men—as a drama, in fact. Frown not, then, on me alone.
Whenever a General Election occurs, the conflict becomes sharper and more obvious—the play more exciting—the audience more tense. The stage is crowded with supernumeraries, not interesting in themselves, but adding a new interest to the merely personal interest. There is the stronger ‘side,’ here the weaker, ranged against each other. Which will be vanquished? It rests with the audience to decide. And, as human nature is human nature, of course the audience decides that the weaker side shall be victorious. That is what politicians call ‘the swing of the pendulum.’ They believe that the country is alienated by the blunders of the Government, and is disappointed by the unfulfilment of promises, and is anxious for other methods of policy. Bless them! the country hardly noticed their blunders, has quite forgotten their promises, and cannot distinguish between one set of methods and another. When the man in the street sees two other men in the street fighting, he doesn’t care to know the cause of the combat: he simply wants the smaller man to punish the bigger, and to punish him with all possible severity. When a party with a large majority appeals to the country, its appeal falls, necessarily, on deaf ears. Some years ago there happened an exception to this rule. But then the circumstances were exceptional. A small nation was fighting a big nation, and, as the big nation happened to be yourselves, your sympathy was transferred to the big nation. As the little party was suspected of favouring the little nation, your sympathy was transferred likewise to the big party. Barring ‘khaki,’ sympathy takes its usual course in General Elections. The bigger the initial majority, the bigger the collapse. It is not enough that Goliath shall fall: he must bite the dust, and bite plenty of it. It is not enough that David shall have done what he set out to do: a throne must be found for this young man. Away with the giant’s body! Hail, King David!
I should like to think that chivalry was the sole motive of our zeal. I am afraid that the mere craving for excitement has something to do with it. Pelion has never been piled on Ossa; and no really useful purpose could be served by the superimposition. But we should like to see the thing done. It would appeal to our sense of the grandiose—our hankering after the unlimited. When the man of science shows us a drop of water in a test-tube, and tells us that this tiny drop contains more than fifteen billions of infusoria, we are subtly gratified, and cherish a secret hope that the number of infusoria is very much more than fifteen billions. In the same way, we hope that the number of seats gained by the winning party will be even greater to-morrow than it is to-day. ‘We are sweeping the country,’ exclaims (say) the professed Liberal; and at the word ‘sweeping’ there is in his eyes a gleam that no mere party feeling could have lit there. It is a gleam that comes from the very depths of his soul—a reflection of the innate human passion for breaking records, or seeing them broken, no matter how or why. ‘Yes,’ says the professed Tory, ‘you certainly are sweeping the country.’ He tries to put a note of despondency into his voice; but hark how he rolls the word ‘sweeping’ over his tongue! He, too, though he may not admit it, is longing to creep into the smoking-room of the National Liberal Club and feast his eyes on the blazing galaxy of red seals affixed to the announcements of the polling. He turns to his evening paper, and reads again the list of ex-Cabinet ministers who have been unseated. He feels, in his heart of hearts, what fun it would be if they had all been unseated. He grudges the exceptions. For political bias is one thing; human nature another.
