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But Mortimer Saw Its Potentialities and He Stayed There with His Duck, Which Became One of the First Stars

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But Mortimer Saw Its Potentialities and He Stayed There with His Duck, Which Became One of the First Stars -4- but children and village idiots; but Mortimer saw its potentialities and he stayed there with his duck, which became one of the first stars. On its death, Mortimer had it stuffed and carried it about with him everywhere. But as fortune favored him, he thought a plastic replica was more artistic and 'classy.' So there was the statue of 'Kush Kush' on his desk. (151) The only specific resemblance between Hollywood Cemetery and The Loved One occurs in the authors' mutual satiric amusement at the hyperboles of American advertising. Waughians will recall Aimee Thanatogenos's preparation for a date as she applies "Jungle Venom": "From the depth of the fever-ridden swamp .. .'Jungle Venom' comes to with the remorseless stealth of the hunting cannibal." O'Fiaherty too has his fun with the extremes and exaggerations of New World advertisements, one of which reads: Don't Burn in Hell. You got to burn some time. Why not let Eucalyptus Crematorium do the job and leave your ashes to the one you love best in a eucalyptus casket. Cheat the Devil. (116) It is only in this passage that O'Fiaherty "anticipated the necrophiliac comedy of Evelyn Waugh." THE RELATIONSHIP OF CHARLES AND SEBASTIAN John W. Osborne (Rutgers University) David Bittner contests my argument, which appears in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter (Winter, 1989, pp. 7-8). that Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited was homosexual. To begin, I completely agree with Mr. Bittner with respect to the video version of the novel making the relationship of Sebastian and Charles Ryder overtly homosexual and thus violating the reticence of Waugh on the subject. My interpretation of Sebastian, however, was made initially thirty years ago, when I first read Brideshead Revisited. The video then was far in the future. I was also not influenced by the "gay liberation" movement and I doubt if I had heard of the phrase then. Subsequent re-readings of the book have reinforced my first impression. Mr. Bittner claims that Lady March main "is no body's fool" and that if Sebastian was homosexual "she would know it." The complex Lady March main seems to me to fit a dictionary definition of fool as "a person of little or no judgment." She was certainly obtuse about Sebastian's alcoholism. Also, how would she know what Sebastian was doing at Eton and Oxford? Mr. Bittner is right when he notes that Ryder's cousin Jasper did not like homosexuals, but living in digs, Jasper could not know everything that went on in the university (although I admit that he tried hard to). On the subject of the cigarette that Ryder lit and then gave to Julia, igniting "a thin bat's squeak of sexuality," I interpret this to reflect the fundamentally heterosexual part of his nature. I would add that on page 76, where this is described, Ryder previously mused that Julia was "especially female as I had felt of no woman before." In the paragraph of Mr. Bittner's article where the point about Ryder and Julia is described, he goes on to note that Ryder married Celia because of physical attraction, loves Julia, and is ill at ease in a homosexual bar. This is true, but Ryder was only nineteen when he gave the cigarette to Julia. He married Celia some time after 1926 (the year of the General Strike). He was in histhirtycsecond year in 1936 when he encountered Julia on the ship and later when Anthony Blanche took him to the Blue Grotto Club. As Julia says, by then Ryder was "lean and grim, not at all the pretty boy Sebastian brought home with him." (p. 239) This, of course, refers to her first meeting with Ryder, when he gave her the cigarette. Exactly. Ryder was no longer an adolescent but a grown man. I agree with Mr. Bittner that (in 1936) he was out of place in a homosexual bar and later described Anthony Blanche as his "pansy friend." (p. 274). This reflects the attitude of other men like Ryder: becoming homophobic as they grow older. I interpret Ryder's words to Brideshead differently than Mr. Bittner, who writes that Ryder "observes nothing out of the ordinary about Sebastian and Kurt's relationship." The preceding pages which describe Ryder's reaction to Kurt suggest otherwise. (pp. 211-216) I believe that Ryder was deceiving the strict, moral Brideshead in order to have Sebastian's allowance continued (Brideshead: "Then he must have his allowance as you suggest.") (p. 217) This is the first indication that Ryder had asked Brideshead to do this, and it appears in the novel right after Ryder's soothing words about Sebastian and Kurt. While there is no conclusive evidence that Sebastian and Ryder had a physical relationship, what does one make of Ryder's remark on pp. 127-128 "He (Sebastian) did not fail in love, but he lost his joy if it"? Or Ryder's saying that his relationship with Sebastian was "naughtiness high in the catalog of grave sins"? (p. 45) I cannot agree with Mr. Bittner that Waugh allowed "unmindful slips" about this subject. As .
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