any of you out there like me addicted to the architecture in this 1981 TV British mini-series? they're making a movie of it: anybody know anything about this? I hear in the movie they're using Chatsworth House as the new 'Brideshead'. How can a movie be better than the original 12 part series? Of course the protagonist, Charles Ryder, is an architectural painter...
well, i'm sort of addicted to the miniseries, but not particularly to the architecture there... i agree, i don't see how a movie can be better than the series...and how can they substitute castle howard? i understand evelyn waugh basically 'used' castle howard as a model for brideshead, so its only logical that that is the building to use...
but really, i'm only addicted in the most shallow of ways... because i used to watch it as a teenager way back when and thought jeremy irons was 'oh so dreamy.'
johndevlin, if you are reall y interested in the architecture of the British ocuntry house then you should look into the Attingham Summer School program, here
It is a three week tour of British country houses for architecture and decorative arts professionals and academics. The itinerary changes from year to year but they always go to some of the big ones, like Chatsworth, and West Dean (both amazing).
The best part of the program, bsides the "summer camp" feeling and the pubs, is the total access you are allwed: you can go behind the ropes that keep the thronging masses aff the furniture, touch the ceramics, see the basements and vaults, etc. I was able to tour the roofscape of the Brighton Pavilion and boy was that fun!
"Professional" can mean a docent at a small living history musem, too, you don't have to be a registered architect or curator of a big museum. They have scholarship money available too.
Also good for people interested in British architecture is the Victorian Society Summer School. I did this in 1997, and it was fantastic. It seems to resemble the one liberty bell mentioned, in that we got a lot of "behind the scenes" opportunities (upending chairs in the Houses of Parliament, climbing the scaffolding at the Albert Memorial restoration, burrowing into the catacombs in a Victorian cemetary, studying at a sadomasochistic diorama at Kip Forbes' Old Battersea House....). The participants were great, from all over the world. About 1/2 were architectual historians, 1/2 were architects, and then there were a few miscellaneous professions represented (an interiors person, a kindergarten teacher, a publisher, etc.). Although at the time I remember being absolutely exhausted (thanks, Gavin Stamp!), I would do it again in a heartbeat, even if we visited all the same sites again.
I bought the series on VHS in 6 tapes in 1995 and basically watch it in a continuous loop: about 20 minutes or so every Sunday evening from 7 to 7:30. When I'm finished with it I just start all over again. The dialogue incredibly nuanced and rich: I'm always hearing new things, since the idiom is British upper middle class and I'm not... even the credits still give me a thrill...
Jun 13, 05 1:43 pm ·
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Doesn't Cordelia ask Charles if modern art is all "bosch?" And Charles answers, "Yes."
According to Lord Marchmain, what nationality of cook makes the best pasteries?
yes, I'm pretty sure Charles says that to Cordelia.
Lord Marchmain said that about pastry chefs in Venice, to the boys: my memory is fuzzy. Doesn't he say the best pastry chefs were Italian, but he didn't know why, because at Brideshead they were always Viennese. Rita: help me!! Also, what was Lady Marchmain's christian name, and which character uses it- the only instance in the series, (I think)??
Jun 13, 05 2:04 pm ·
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Lord Marchmain says that people say the best pastry chefs are Italian, but that that is not true because the best ones that he knows of are Austrian.
Don't know Lady Marchmain's christian name, nor do I recall who used it. Does she herself use it when talking with Charles in the greenhouse?
no: she wouldn't do such a thing. It is used by Celia - Charles's wife -she refers to her as "Theresa" - presumably it was OK for Celia to do this because she was a "Lady" being Boy Mulcaster's sister, latter who was the son of Viscount Mulcaster (which we learn when he was in jail with the boys). Sorry: I must look like a show-off, don't intend to. This Brideshead 'trivial pursuits' could go on ad infinitum...
man o man i would have been able to answer the austrian chef quiz. but i don't know lady marchmain's christian name. but she's a bloods-s-sucker, i tell you [anthony/antoine blanche]
i was already a big fan of the series and then i actually found the book abandoned in a studio site. the site was an abandoned burned down building. the book was face down in a corner. i 'stole' it... always felt i was stealing it from someone that used that spot for quiet reading, but then again, why leave the book? the copy is done after the series, containing a couple of photographs of the cast in the cover and back.
charles says: yes cordelia, great bosch. and as much as i would like this to be a double entendre meaning it's really great, i understand as meaning quite literally that he does not approve, since he paints in a naturalistic, perspectival way.
charles's profession i always thought was a great reflection of his nature as an observer of life, best described in his fight with julia. it's a way i have he says. i hate it, says julia.
ps. rita i'm back after quite long trouble with my computer and to tell you the truth i've lost some interest in the tafuri/piranesi discussion. maybe we can start that over later on?
Jun 13, 05 2:58 pm ·
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Can anyone name the poem that Anthony recites off the balcony of Sabastian's digs?
I used to hang out at an entertainment web board that is now gone - and the rumor was that Jud Law would play Sebastian and Colin Farrell was up for Charles. That was long long time ago though, before anyone found out what Colin Farrell was really like.
aml, Piranesi's Ichnographia Campi Martii and all the mistaken interpretations thereof will be thoroughly expounded upon within "Sketches cum Napkins," the middle chapter of A Quondam Banquet of Virtual Sachlichkeit: Part II available Fall 2005.
EDWARD (sorry, that was an unfair question, Rita, his name only appears - I am fairly certain - in the credits) Wasn't Sir John Gielgud a wonderfully dotty old guy in this role??
Jun 27, 05 1:42 pm ·
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I think he was a perfect example of "you are what you eat."
Hayter... I don't know the actor who played this sepulchral character who rattled the dinner plates in such an exquisite manner: does anybody out there?
Jun 27, 05 1:56 pm ·
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[Among other things,] I'm currently reading The Building of Castle Howard by Charles Saumarez Smith (1990). So far I've read chapter 2, "The Architect." The fact that Vanbrugh was more a playwright and only an amateur architect recently came to my attention, and now I'm very much intrigued by the man. Even before the televised Brideshead Revisited, Castle Howard (designed beginning 1699) was among my favorite architectural designs--I used to read Fletcher's The History of Architecture on the Comparative Method during study hall when a freshman in high school (1970-71).
I'm now wondering whether the above image of Castle Howard from Vitruvius Britannicus (published 1715-1725) somehow inspired the architecture of Piranesi as delineated within the Campo Marzio (1762). Remember the Ichnographia of the Campo Marzio (1757-62) is dedicated to Robert Adam. Did Adam show Piranesi Vitruvius Britannicus while he (Adam) was friends with Piranesi in Rome in the 1750s? In any case, the perspectival vantage point and indeed the architecture depicted within the perspectives of the Campo Marzio very much evoke the Castle Howard aerial perspective, for example the Frontispiece of the Campo Marzio:
Anyway, here are my favorite passages from The Building of Castle Howard so far:
What is ingenious about Vanbrugh's ground plan at Castle Howard was the way that it contrived to create the maximum visual effects of architectural scale and magnificence out of the minimum number of rooms. Both externally and internally it looked and felt like a much larger house than it actually was, if calculated in floor space.
--page 55.
Every visitor to the house must have experienced disillusionment at the conflict between the excessive grandiosity of the exterior and the disappointing smallness of the rooms inside. The exterior establishes expectations which are not fulfilled indoors. Although both the elevations and the ground plan are, by themselves, magnificently conceived, there is a curious lack of relationship between the two, a feeling of physical incongruity and architectural disjunction. There is only one set of quite small rooms behind much of the great length of the south facade. There is no organic relationship between the layout of the interior and the architectural forms outside. Too much is gratuitous. As Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, a Scottish landowner who had travelled extensively on the continent and was himself an amateur architect, commented on the occasion of a visit on his way to London in 1727, 'there is not one good apartment in the whole house, at least not one which is in any way suitable to the grandure and expense of the outside.'
--page 57.
These passages got me wondering whether Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is meant to evoke the same feelings about the Marchmain family--deceptively grand on the outside, but actually small on the inside.
Did you know?
Vanbrugh in a letter to the Duchess of Marlborough [in 1716 wrote]: The word Corridore Madam is foreign, and signifys in plain English, no more than a Passage, it is now however generally us'd as an English Word.
--page 54.
Rita: you are prodigious: I knew before I opened this post that it wd be from you. I know you care. someone once said that palladian mansions in england are the opposite of the baroque. As is said above, the baroque houses create expectations that are not born out by the interior. With the large palladian houses the opposite is the case: the interiors are sumptuous whilst the exteriors a bit dry and academic.
As for your theory of how this applies to the Marchmain family, it is a fascinating hypothesis and deserves further study on this august thread.
If you DO go to Castle Howard, be sure and visit the Mausoleum by Hawksmoor: surely a great monument of any age: quite knocked my socks off when I visited it in 1974(?). Lady Marchmain of course was buried under the funerary chapel. I could not enter the chapel due to the dangerous state of the masonry which was literally falling down in chunks. I hope the Howard family has found the funds to restore this incredible building.
Aug 5, 05 1:13 pm ·
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Virtual traveling is likely the closest I'll ever come to Castle Howard from now on.
As to the Mausoleum by Hawkmoor, here's what Smith writes beginning the "Acknowledgements": "I first became interested in the history of Castle Howard when, as an undergraduate, I wrote a dissertation on eighteenth-century mausolea: the mausoleum at Castle Howard was much the most significant, as well as the best documented." The final chapter of The Building of Castle Howard is entitle "The Mausoleum".
Returning to the notion of Vanbrugh as (Restoration/Baroque) playwright, and the way that Vanbrugh's personality is described by contemporaries, I was reminded of the main character of Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract.
I forgot to mention this before--the Castle Howard-Ichnographia Campi Martii connection may also be found in some of Piranesi's individual plans within the large plan. For example, the Porticus Gratiani, Valentiniani et Theodosii somehow reminds me of the plan of Castle Howard (sorry there's no image to offer now)--the plans are not what you would call 'alike', but they both strive for maximum effect through minium means.
[Just for fun, did you know that when an image of Boullee is shown in Grennaway's The Belly of an Architect, the image shown is actually that of Piranesi?!]
I did... you amaze me... again: right up your alley. I should have guessed it would be something like that.
(for the record which is unimportant I became a Roman Catholic in 1979. I am not sure it makes you a better person: wasn't Waugh a notorious snob?)
I'll never find the time to read that amazing essay in your link... (glanced through it, though...)
And speaking of Jude Law, I never met him either, but I did meet a character he played in 1997.
Actually, I met Danny and Jim simultaneously, in a very intimate social situation, ie, playing Psycho Dice on a screened porch facing the Atlantic Ocean on a late August 1979 Sunday afternoon. I don't know what Danny was like in 1981 before Jim shot him dead, but in 1979 Danny stuck to Jim like a desperate puppy. I remember how a look in Danny's eyes told me he was beginning to get jealous of Jim, Billy P. and I having lots of fun playing games, etc.
Berendt never met Danny, but he kinda described him correctly.
The last time I saw Jim was early August 1989. He had just gotten back from Venice and spent a lot of time showing Lance travel snapshots. Jim loved to pontificate, and one of his favorite expressions was "You don't know a thing!" One of the last things I ever said to Jim made everyone else laugh when, after he was done telling yet another one of his attention grabbing stories, I simply said, "You don't know a thing!"
"And we become these human jukeboxes, spilling out these anecdotes."
--Six Degrees of Separation
Revisiting Brideshead was televised last night.1 I had seen this 11 part series on television back in the 1980s or early 1990s after it first came out in 1981. I had not read the novel, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by English writer Evelyn Waugh which was first published in 1945. In 2015 I had the pleasure of seeing the 2008 film version.2 I wrote about the TV series and the film after I had retired from my 50 year life-experience as a student and in paid employment, 1949-1999, and after I had seen the series a second time in Australia.
The Flyte family who lived at Brideshead symbolises the English nobility, and Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy brings that nobility to life. One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age." Viewers, millions, enjoy the opulent and aristocratic edge, the glitter and gloss, the grandeur and the glamour of this wealthy family estate, and of a time in our history now quickly dying-out, if not long gone. In this one house, as one reviewer put it, is a fading, a dying, empire; or is it just sublime real estate. For many, in the millennial and generation Z, I can just about hear them clicking on the remote and uttering a now familiar word, a word especially familiar to people like me who retired after more than 30 years in classrooms: borrrring!
There's room for more than one Brideshead in this far less glamorous day and age, though, room at least for the baby-boomers and for the silent generation among the viewing public, with the glitter and gloss of society now often tarnished beyond repair in our complex 21st century.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2, 11:55-12:45, 19 & 20/9/’11, and 2ABCTV, 8/2/'15, 10:05-11:30 pm.
1981 was a bad year in the UK
with 2 & ½ million out of work
and a list of bad news to fill all
those English heads to the top.1
There was nothing like this bit
of escapism from the real world
into a nostalgic, a romanticized
past, homoerotic suggestiveness,
Evelyn Waugh’s WW2 vision.2
I’ll let all you readers find out
what it all meant to Waugh, to
his critics & to modern viewers
whose views are available for us
to see on that new source of info:
the internet, the world-wide-web.3
1 See Wikipedia for all the bad news in 1981.
2 Waugh wrote in the preface to the 1959 edition of the book that he was appalled by his book, and that he found rereading it distasteful. I was only 15 at the time, and had read none of Waugh. I lived in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in love with sport and at least 3 girls. The plot of the book was set in 1943-1944, in the months when I was in utero.
3 I was particularly interested in Waugh’s defence of Catholicism, his critique of secular humanism, and his emphasis on the many forms of conversion that take place in peoples’ lives.
In the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 the novel Brideshead Revisited was written in England. In those same months I existed in utero on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. When Evelyn Waugh, the author of this novel, wrote his preface to a revised edition of the book in 1959, and Fr. Ronald Knox published his biography of Waugh in that same year---I was 15 and had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in the middle of my adolescent baseball and ice-hockey careers. By my 20s my sport-playing days had ended, although I have remained a Baha’i all my life.
Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 In the end, this is a common experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike, especially in our troubled-age. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2
Part 2:
Waugh saw this novel, Brideshead Revisited, as his magnum opus but, on reading it later in life, he found what he called its "rhetorical and ornamental language.....distasteful."3 Readers with the interest in this film and this novel should surf-about on Wikipedia and other internet sources for all sorts of bits-and-pieces of information and analysis.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh(1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, W.W. Norton & Co., NY., 1987 & 1992, resp., V.2, p.492; and3 Wikipedia.
Part 3:
Without Christianity you saw
civilization doomed or, as you
put it in your conversion: “it is
like stepping out of a Looking-
Glass world, where everything
is an absurd caricature, into the
real world God made, and then
begins the delicious process of
exploring it limitlessly.”1..This
is perhaps the most succinct &
sufficient description of process
in the act of conversions that ever
were written in that 20th century.
Waugh's own conversion from the
"absurd caricature" of what might
be called ultra-modernity to that
real world of Catholic orthodoxy
was greeted with astonishment by
the literary world and it caused a
sensation in the media. Do those
who have watched Brideshead in
these last 30 years know of this?
I did not until today and, wanting
to know something about how this
television series and film came into
existence in those last twenty-five
years: 1981 to 2007, I learned that
there was much to learn with a little
research and reading, and not even
reading E. Waugh's book at all.......
Part 4:
“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests."
Waugh concluded the above press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared inLay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968.
Ron Price
14/7/'11 to 12/2/'15.
Feb 14, 15 4:13 am ·
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Brideshead Revisited
any of you out there like me addicted to the architecture in this 1981 TV British mini-series? they're making a movie of it: anybody know anything about this? I hear in the movie they're using Chatsworth House as the new 'Brideshead'. How can a movie be better than the original 12 part series? Of course the protagonist, Charles Ryder, is an architectural painter...
well, i'm sort of addicted to the miniseries, but not particularly to the architecture there... i agree, i don't see how a movie can be better than the series...and how can they substitute castle howard? i understand evelyn waugh basically 'used' castle howard as a model for brideshead, so its only logical that that is the building to use...
but really, i'm only addicted in the most shallow of ways... because i used to watch it as a teenager way back when and thought jeremy irons was 'oh so dreamy.'
johndevlin, if you are reall y interested in the architecture of the British ocuntry house then you should look into the Attingham Summer School program, here
It is a three week tour of British country houses for architecture and decorative arts professionals and academics. The itinerary changes from year to year but they always go to some of the big ones, like Chatsworth, and West Dean (both amazing).
The best part of the program, bsides the "summer camp" feeling and the pubs, is the total access you are allwed: you can go behind the ropes that keep the thronging masses aff the furniture, touch the ceramics, see the basements and vaults, etc. I was able to tour the roofscape of the Brighton Pavilion and boy was that fun!
"Professional" can mean a docent at a small living history musem, too, you don't have to be a registered architect or curator of a big museum. They have scholarship money available too.
Also good for people interested in British architecture is the Victorian Society Summer School. I did this in 1997, and it was fantastic. It seems to resemble the one liberty bell mentioned, in that we got a lot of "behind the scenes" opportunities (upending chairs in the Houses of Parliament, climbing the scaffolding at the Albert Memorial restoration, burrowing into the catacombs in a Victorian cemetary, studying at a sadomasochistic diorama at Kip Forbes' Old Battersea House....). The participants were great, from all over the world. About 1/2 were architectual historians, 1/2 were architects, and then there were a few miscellaneous professions represented (an interiors person, a kindergarten teacher, a publisher, etc.). Although at the time I remember being absolutely exhausted (thanks, Gavin Stamp!), I would do it again in a heartbeat, even if we visited all the same sites again.
I bought the series on VHS in 6 tapes in 1995 and basically watch it in a continuous loop: about 20 minutes or so every Sunday evening from 7 to 7:30. When I'm finished with it I just start all over again. The dialogue incredibly nuanced and rich: I'm always hearing new things, since the idiom is British upper middle class and I'm not... even the credits still give me a thrill...
Doesn't Cordelia ask Charles if modern art is all "bosch?" And Charles answers, "Yes."
According to Lord Marchmain, what nationality of cook makes the best pasteries?
yes, I'm pretty sure Charles says that to Cordelia.
Lord Marchmain said that about pastry chefs in Venice, to the boys: my memory is fuzzy. Doesn't he say the best pastry chefs were Italian, but he didn't know why, because at Brideshead they were always Viennese. Rita: help me!! Also, what was Lady Marchmain's christian name, and which character uses it- the only instance in the series, (I think)??
Lord Marchmain says that people say the best pastry chefs are Italian, but that that is not true because the best ones that he knows of are Austrian.
Don't know Lady Marchmain's christian name, nor do I recall who used it. Does she herself use it when talking with Charles in the greenhouse?
no: she wouldn't do such a thing. It is used by Celia - Charles's wife -she refers to her as "Theresa" - presumably it was OK for Celia to do this because she was a "Lady" being Boy Mulcaster's sister, latter who was the son of Viscount Mulcaster (which we learn when he was in jail with the boys). Sorry: I must look like a show-off, don't intend to. This Brideshead 'trivial pursuits' could go on ad infinitum...
Wow...
Y'all are crazy.
man o man i would have been able to answer the austrian chef quiz. but i don't know lady marchmain's christian name. but she's a bloods-s-sucker, i tell you [anthony/antoine blanche]
i was already a big fan of the series and then i actually found the book abandoned in a studio site. the site was an abandoned burned down building. the book was face down in a corner. i 'stole' it... always felt i was stealing it from someone that used that spot for quiet reading, but then again, why leave the book? the copy is done after the series, containing a couple of photographs of the cast in the cover and back.
charles says: yes cordelia, great bosch. and as much as i would like this to be a double entendre meaning it's really great, i understand as meaning quite literally that he does not approve, since he paints in a naturalistic, perspectival way.
charles's profession i always thought was a great reflection of his nature as an observer of life, best described in his fight with julia. it's a way i have he says. i hate it, says julia.
ps. rita i'm back after quite long trouble with my computer and to tell you the truth i've lost some interest in the tafuri/piranesi discussion. maybe we can start that over later on?
Can anyone name the poem that Anthony recites off the balcony of Sabastian's digs?
it's from "The Wasteland" (by TS E)
(I think) does anybody recall the name of Rex Mottram's first wife?
teresa marchmain!!!!
i just found it on the book. she signs her letter to charles.
[er lady marchmain that is, not rex's wife]
I used to hang out at an entertainment web board that is now gone - and the rumor was that Jud Law would play Sebastian and Colin Farrell was up for Charles. That was long long time ago though, before anyone found out what Colin Farrell was really like.
check this regularly
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412536/
Hey, have you guys ever seen that show Brideshead Revisited? I heard they are making a movie of it.
I want Joanna Lumley to play the new Lady Marchmain!!!
you also might want to check this
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412536/board/threads/
aml, Piranesi's Ichnographia Campi Martii and all the mistaken interpretations thereof will be thoroughly expounded upon within "Sketches cum Napkins," the middle chapter of A Quondam Banquet of Virtual Sachlichkeit: Part II available Fall 2005.
trick question: anyone remember Charles' father's Christian name?
Christian?
sorry... FIRST name...
So I guess Christian isn't his first name?
EDWARD (sorry, that was an unfair question, Rita, his name only appears - I am fairly certain - in the credits) Wasn't Sir John Gielgud a wonderfully dotty old guy in this role??
I think he was a perfect example of "you are what you eat."
do you remember his butler's name?
Dick Hertz?
Hayter... I don't know the actor who played this sepulchral character who rattled the dinner plates in such an exquisite manner: does anybody out there?
[Among other things,] I'm currently reading The Building of Castle Howard by Charles Saumarez Smith (1990). So far I've read chapter 2, "The Architect." The fact that Vanbrugh was more a playwright and only an amateur architect recently came to my attention, and now I'm very much intrigued by the man. Even before the televised Brideshead Revisited, Castle Howard (designed beginning 1699) was among my favorite architectural designs--I used to read Fletcher's The History of Architecture on the Comparative Method during study hall when a freshman in high school (1970-71).
I'm now wondering whether the above image of Castle Howard from Vitruvius Britannicus (published 1715-1725) somehow inspired the architecture of Piranesi as delineated within the Campo Marzio (1762). Remember the Ichnographia of the Campo Marzio (1757-62) is dedicated to Robert Adam. Did Adam show Piranesi Vitruvius Britannicus while he (Adam) was friends with Piranesi in Rome in the 1750s? In any case, the perspectival vantage point and indeed the architecture depicted within the perspectives of the Campo Marzio very much evoke the Castle Howard aerial perspective, for example the Frontispiece of the Campo Marzio:
Anyway, here are my favorite passages from The Building of Castle Howard so far:
What is ingenious about Vanbrugh's ground plan at Castle Howard was the way that it contrived to create the maximum visual effects of architectural scale and magnificence out of the minimum number of rooms. Both externally and internally it looked and felt like a much larger house than it actually was, if calculated in floor space.
--page 55.
Every visitor to the house must have experienced disillusionment at the conflict between the excessive grandiosity of the exterior and the disappointing smallness of the rooms inside. The exterior establishes expectations which are not fulfilled indoors. Although both the elevations and the ground plan are, by themselves, magnificently conceived, there is a curious lack of relationship between the two, a feeling of physical incongruity and architectural disjunction. There is only one set of quite small rooms behind much of the great length of the south facade. There is no organic relationship between the layout of the interior and the architectural forms outside. Too much is gratuitous. As Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, a Scottish landowner who had travelled extensively on the continent and was himself an amateur architect, commented on the occasion of a visit on his way to London in 1727, 'there is not one good apartment in the whole house, at least not one which is in any way suitable to the grandure and expense of the outside.'
--page 57.
These passages got me wondering whether Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is meant to evoke the same feelings about the Marchmain family--deceptively grand on the outside, but actually small on the inside.
Did you know?
Vanbrugh in a letter to the Duchess of Marlborough [in 1716 wrote]: The word Corridore Madam is foreign, and signifys in plain English, no more than a Passage, it is now however generally us'd as an English Word.
--page 54.
Rita: you are prodigious: I knew before I opened this post that it wd be from you. I know you care. someone once said that palladian mansions in england are the opposite of the baroque. As is said above, the baroque houses create expectations that are not born out by the interior. With the large palladian houses the opposite is the case: the interiors are sumptuous whilst the exteriors a bit dry and academic.
As for your theory of how this applies to the Marchmain family, it is a fascinating hypothesis and deserves further study on this august thread.
If you DO go to Castle Howard, be sure and visit the Mausoleum by Hawksmoor: surely a great monument of any age: quite knocked my socks off when I visited it in 1974(?). Lady Marchmain of course was buried under the funerary chapel. I could not enter the chapel due to the dangerous state of the masonry which was literally falling down in chunks. I hope the Howard family has found the funds to restore this incredible building.
Virtual traveling is likely the closest I'll ever come to Castle Howard from now on.
As to the Mausoleum by Hawkmoor, here's what Smith writes beginning the "Acknowledgements": "I first became interested in the history of Castle Howard when, as an undergraduate, I wrote a dissertation on eighteenth-century mausolea: the mausoleum at Castle Howard was much the most significant, as well as the best documented." The final chapter of The Building of Castle Howard is entitle "The Mausoleum".
Returning to the notion of Vanbrugh as (Restoration/Baroque) playwright, and the way that Vanbrugh's personality is described by contemporaries, I was reminded of the main character of Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract.
I haven't read any of Vanbrugh's plays yet, but I might start with The Country House.
http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-283323-5
I forgot to mention this before--the Castle Howard-Ichnographia Campi Martii connection may also be found in some of Piranesi's individual plans within the large plan. For example, the Porticus Gratiani, Valentiniani et Theodosii somehow reminds me of the plan of Castle Howard (sorry there's no image to offer now)--the plans are not what you would call 'alike', but they both strive for maximum effect through minium means.
[Just for fun, did you know that when an image of Boullee is shown in Grennaway's The Belly of an Architect, the image shown is actually that of Piranesi?!]
Just did some virtual traveling to Castle Howard:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=castle+howard,+york,+england&ll=54.123117,-0.906029&spn=0.024610,0.056017&t=k&num=10&start=0&hl=en
--one of those not-in-public-satellite-focus-yet sites, but the entry axis (of double trees) is discernable, as is the then prependicular axis leading to the (north) front of the castle.
So why can't I really travel there? Well, not only do I think baroque, but I also am broke.
lake looks like a california.
Rita: did you look here?
Thanks John, now I wonder who the "virtual artist in residence" is.
And yes, there is that California impression of the lake, so now I wonder what impression Lake Titicaca makes.
"My Castle Howard"
fore and aft as well
Lake Titicaca is a gift from dear rita, on this friday.
talking about axis..
Rita: scroll down to see pictures of Hawksmoor's Mausoleum and also the crypt where Lady Marchmain was buried.
Hey John, since you at least like intellectual teasers, what novel did Waugh think of as his best work of fiction?
If you don't already know, here's the answer.
Hint: remember that Rita Novel is asking the question.
I dunno... this is a trap as clever as only you could devise... "Vile Bodies"?
click on the answer
I did... you amaze me... again: right up your alley. I should have guessed it would be something like that.
(for the record which is unimportant I became a Roman Catholic in 1979. I am not sure it makes you a better person: wasn't Waugh a notorious snob?)
I'll never find the time to read that amazing essay in your link... (glanced through it, though...)
I never met Waugh, so I couldn't say.
no, I never met him either. anecdotal.
And speaking of Jude Law, I never met him either, but I did meet a character he played in 1997.
Actually, I met Danny and Jim simultaneously, in a very intimate social situation, ie, playing Psycho Dice on a screened porch facing the Atlantic Ocean on a late August 1979 Sunday afternoon. I don't know what Danny was like in 1981 before Jim shot him dead, but in 1979 Danny stuck to Jim like a desperate puppy. I remember how a look in Danny's eyes told me he was beginning to get jealous of Jim, Billy P. and I having lots of fun playing games, etc.
Berendt never met Danny, but he kinda described him correctly.
The last time I saw Jim was early August 1989. He had just gotten back from Venice and spent a lot of time showing Lance travel snapshots. Jim loved to pontificate, and one of his favorite expressions was "You don't know a thing!" One of the last things I ever said to Jim made everyone else laugh when, after he was done telling yet another one of his attention grabbing stories, I simply said, "You don't know a thing!"
"And we become these human jukeboxes, spilling out these anecdotes."
--Six Degrees of Separation
REVISITING BRIDESHEAD
Revisiting Brideshead was televised last night.1 I had seen this 11 part series on television back in the 1980s or early 1990s after it first came out in 1981. I had not read the novel, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by English writer Evelyn Waugh which was first published in 1945. In 2015 I had the pleasure of seeing the 2008 film version.2 I wrote about the TV series and the film after I had retired from my 50 year life-experience as a student and in paid employment, 1949-1999, and after I had seen the series a second time in Australia.
The Flyte family who lived at Brideshead symbolises the English nobility, and Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy brings that nobility to life. One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age." Viewers, millions, enjoy the opulent and aristocratic edge, the glitter and gloss, the grandeur and the glamour of this wealthy family estate, and of a time in our history now quickly dying-out, if not long gone. In this one house, as one reviewer put it, is a fading, a dying, empire; or is it just sublime real estate. For many, in the millennial and generation Z, I can just about hear them clicking on the remote and uttering a now familiar word, a word especially familiar to people like me who retired after more than 30 years in classrooms: borrrring!
There's room for more than one Brideshead in this far less glamorous day and age, though, room at least for the baby-boomers and for the silent generation among the viewing public, with the glitter and gloss of society now often tarnished beyond repair in our complex 21st century.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2, 11:55-12:45, 19 & 20/9/’11, and 2ABCTV, 8/2/'15, 10:05-11:30 pm.
1981 was a bad year in the UK
with 2 & ½ million out of work
and a list of bad news to fill all
those English heads to the top.1
There was nothing like this bit
of escapism from the real world
into a nostalgic, a romanticized
past, homoerotic suggestiveness,
Evelyn Waugh’s WW2 vision.2
I’ll let all you readers find out
what it all meant to Waugh, to
his critics & to modern viewers
whose views are available for us
to see on that new source of info:
the internet, the world-wide-web.3
1 See Wikipedia for all the bad news in 1981.
2 Waugh wrote in the preface to the 1959 edition of the book that he was appalled by his book, and that he found rereading it distasteful. I was only 15 at the time, and had read none of Waugh. I lived in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in love with sport and at least 3 girls. The plot of the book was set in 1943-1944, in the months when I was in utero.
3 I was particularly interested in Waugh’s defence of Catholicism, his critique of secular humanism, and his emphasis on the many forms of conversion that take place in peoples’ lives.
Ron Price
20/9/'11 to 12/2/'15.
-------------------------------------------------------------
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
Part 1:
In the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 the novel Brideshead Revisited was written in England. In those same months I existed in utero on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. When Evelyn Waugh, the author of this novel, wrote his preface to a revised edition of the book in 1959, and Fr. Ronald Knox published his biography of Waugh in that same year---I was 15 and had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in the middle of my adolescent baseball and ice-hockey careers. By my 20s my sport-playing days had ended, although I have remained a Baha’i all my life.
Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 In the end, this is a common experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike, especially in our troubled-age. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2
Part 2:
Waugh saw this novel, Brideshead Revisited, as his magnum opus but, on reading it later in life, he found what he called its "rhetorical and ornamental language.....distasteful."3 Readers with the interest in this film and this novel should surf-about on Wikipedia and other internet sources for all sorts of bits-and-pieces of information and analysis.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh(1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, W.W. Norton & Co., NY., 1987 & 1992, resp., V.2, p.492; and3 Wikipedia.
Part 3:
Without Christianity you saw
civilization doomed or, as you
put it in your conversion: “it is
like stepping out of a Looking-
Glass world, where everything
is an absurd caricature, into the
real world God made, and then
begins the delicious process of
exploring it limitlessly.”1..This
is perhaps the most succinct &
sufficient description of process
in the act of conversions that ever
were written in that 20th century.
Waugh's own conversion from the
"absurd caricature" of what might
be called ultra-modernity to that
real world of Catholic orthodoxy
was greeted with astonishment by
the literary world and it caused a
sensation in the media. Do those
who have watched Brideshead in
these last 30 years know of this?
I did not until today and, wanting
to know something about how this
television series and film came into
existence in those last twenty-five
years: 1981 to 2007, I learned that
there was much to learn with a little
research and reading, and not even
reading E. Waugh's book at all.......
Part 4:
“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests."
Waugh concluded the above press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared in Lay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968.
Ron Price
14/7/'11 to 12/2/'15.
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