'[The Brideshead Generation]
has both style and substance, and is above all an enjoyable
companion. It has a wildly amusing cast, here controlled by a skilful
director.' "Evening Standard"
'Jovial and entertaining, full
of the sort of stories that your friends will tell you if you don't
read it before them.' "Independent"
'Carpenter has read widely and
has collected an enormous fund of entertaining stories and facts.'
"Sunday Telegraph"
'Hauntingly sad and
wonderfully funny and by far the best thing Humphrey Carpenter has
done.' Fiona MacCarthy, "The Times"
Review By William Tegner on July 6, 2003
This is an admirable book,
well written, balanced and well researched. After a slightly hesitant
start, the scene shifts to Oxford in the early twenties; it comes
across as a very dissolute place, with distinct homosexual
undertones. The noticeable "public school" backdrop leaves
you wondering why anyone should send their child to an English
boarding school (at very great expense, incidentally). But they did,
and still do. However, at Oxford we are introduced to a veritable
galaxy of talent, including Evelyn Waugh, the lead character in the
book, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Anthony Powell
and others. There are some very amusing quotes and anecdotes.
But the book becomes
increasingly serious, and whilst not specifically a work of literary
criticism, it cites reviews and gives the background to the works of
Waugh and to a lesser extent others. It also looks at the curious
world of the Roman Catholic convert. At the end I felt a little sad
for Waugh and some of his contemporaries. In spite of their
achievements, by no means all of them seemed happy.
Books
of The Times; When Wit Was All And Kindness Was Nil
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: December
22, 1989
The Brideshead
Generation Evelyn Waugh and His Friends By Humphrey Carpenter 523
pages. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin. $27.95.
''She almost wished
in this new mood of exaltation that she had come to the party in
fancy dress. It was called a Savage party, that is to say that
Johnnie Hoop had written on the invitation that they were to come
dressed as savages. Numbers of them had done so; Johnnie himself in a
mask and black gloves represented the Maharanee of Pukkapore,
somewhat to the annoyance of the Maharajah, who happened to drop in.
The real aristocracy, the younger members of those two or three great
brewing families which rule London, had done nothing about it. They
had come on from a dance and stood in a little group by themselves,
aloof, amused but not amusing.''
Evelyn Waugh's
wicked description of a party in ''Vile Bodies'' gleefully captures
the inane posturing of the Bright Young Things who came of age in
London during the 1920's, and at the same time it captures the
brittle mood of Waugh's own Oxford generation: a sense of postwar
futility gaudily disguised as frivolity; a yearning after the
aristocratic values of a vanished, nondemocratic age; a willful
determination to substitute hedonism and witty detachment for
seriousness and introspection.
Though Humphrey
Carpenter's new book, ''The Brideshead Generation,'' touches briefly
upon the forces that shaped Waugh and his friends -namely, the
convulsive aftereffects of World War I, and the emergence of a new
bourgeois society - it makes little serious attempt to situate this
group of writers within the continuum of English cultural history or
to assess its overall achievement. The reader who is interested in
the social impulses that led to the ascendency of Waugh's circle (a
group that included Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, John Betjeman,
Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton and Brian Howard) would
do better to examine Martin Green's ''Children of the Sun,'' an
original and absorbing study that carefully examines the emergence of
these writers vis-a-vis earlier and later literary groups personified
by Kipling, Orwell and Auden.
As for ''The
Brideshead Generation,'' the book pretty much limits itself to
chronicling the careers of Waugh and some of his friends, drawing
heavily upon these writers' fiction and autobiographical works, and
such secondary sources as Christopher Syke's biography of Waugh.
Because these
authors wrote so cleverly about themeselves, because their lives were
so crammed with colorful anecdotes, ''The Brideshead Generation''
makes for fast, diverting reading. Though much of the material is
just old literary gossip, Mr. Carpenter manages to do a fluent job of
weaving this information in with pithy analyses of individual books
and casual sketches of overlapping social worlds. The reader gets to
see John Betjeman, the future poet laureate of England, carrying his
teddy bear (like Sebastian in ''Brideshead Revisited'') around the
Oxford campus; the young Graham Greene playing Russian roulette with
a loaded revolver, and an aging Waugh taunting unwanted guests with
his huge antique ear trumpet.
The snobbish,
insular realms of Eton and Oxford are conjured up in a couple of
brief chapters, and the reader is quickly immersed in the acutely
class-conscious politics of student society. The esthetic choices
made during these school days would later shape entire lives and
careers, but many of those choices appear to have initially been made
on completely arbitrary grounds.
According to Mr.
Carpenter, the future art connoisseur Harold Acton became an ardent
proponent of mid-Victorian style because his rival esthetes at Oxford
had already put dibs on the period of the 1890's; the only other
viable alternative - ''to become pure modern'' - was embraced by
Auden's circle. Waugh, Mr. Carpenter suggests, similarly gravitated
toward political conservatism as an expedient social measure. Though
he and his public school pals had ''sometimes posed as 'Bolshevik,'
'' writes Mr. Carpenter, Waugh realized, upon his arrival at Oxford,
''that if he were to join one of the left-wing groups at Oxford he
would 'find the competition too hot.' ''
In a well-known
passage in ''Enemies of Promise,'' Cyril Connolly posited the theory
that the experiences he and his contemporaries had undergone as
students were ''so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest
their development. From these it results that the greater part of the
ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious,
cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.''
Certainly the
adolescent aspect applies quite pointedly to many of the writers in
this volume. Though he outgrew his youthful fantasies of suicide,
Greene has spent the better part of his life traveling the globe,
looking for other ways of escape. With ''Enemies of Promise'' and
''The Unquiet Grave,'' Connolly became a specialist in the themes of
futility and self-reproach. Brian Howard evaded his early literary
promise by spending the better part of his life aimlessly wandering
about Europe, before committing suicide in 1958.
Waugh, of course,
went on to write a series of wonderfully comic novels - as well as
the more elegiac ''Brideshead Revisited'' - but by middle age, he had
sunk deep into an alcohol-soaked depression, his pose of defensive
detachment calcifying into a ferocious misanthropy that alienated
family and friends. He took a journalist to court for implying that
his brother Alec's books had sold more than his own; and he
complained that his own children were ''defective adults'' -
''feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humourless.''
By the end of his
life, he was constantly complaining that he was ''bored bored
bored.'' It was a depressing and somehow fitting end to a life that
increasingly revolved - like much of his social set's - around the
snobbish distinctions of wealth and class, and a glittering but empty
series of parties, drinking bouts and stupid jokes.
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