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Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

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Paula Byrne Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead Аннотация A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England’s greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, ‘Brideshead Revisited’.Evelyn Waugh was already famous when ‘Brideshead Revisited’ was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, the novel was, he admitted, of no ‘immediate propaganda value’. Instead, it was the story of a household, a family and a journey of religious faith – an elegy, in many ways, for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier.The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric and compelling as their counterparts in ‘Brideshead Revisited’. In this engrossing biography, Paula Byrne takes an innovative approach to her subject, setting out to capture Waugh through those friendships that mattered most to him. Far from the snobbish misanthropist of popular caricature, she uncovers a man as loving and complex as the family that inspired him – a family deeply traumatised when their father was revealed as a homosexual and forced to flee the country.This brilliantly original biography unlocks for the first time the extent to which Waugh’s great novel encoded and transformed his own experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the loves and obsessions that shaped his life, and brings us inevitably to a secret that dared not speak its name. Содержание PAULA BYRNE 6 COPYRIGHT 7 Contents 9 PROLOGUE 11 CHAPTER 1 A Tale of Two Childhoods 16 CHAPTER 2 Lancing versus Eton 42 CHAPTER 3 Oxford: â⦠her secret none can 78 utterâ CHAPTER 4 The Scarlet Woman 113 CHAPTER 5 In the Balance 130 CHAPTER 6 The Lygon Heritage 147 Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. 149 PAULA BYRNE Mad World Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead COPYRIGHT Harper Press An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk This HarperPress paperback edition published 2010 First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2009 Copyright © Paula Byrne 2009 PS Section copyright © Sarah OâReilly 2010, except âOther Worldsâ by Paula Byrne © Paula Byrne 2010 PS⢠is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. Paula Byrne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780007243778 Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007455478 Version: 2016-09-22 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Prologue Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Childhoods Chapter 2: Lancing versus Eton Chapter 3: Oxford: â⦠her secret none can utterâ Chapter 4: The Scarlet Woman Chapter 5: In the Balance Chapter 6: The Lygon Heritage Chapter 7: Untoward Incidents Chapter 8: Bright Young Things Chapter 9: The Busting of Boom Chapter 10: Madresfield Visited Chapter 11: The Beauchamp Belles Chapter 12: Christmas at Mad Chapter 13: An Encounter in Rome Chapter 14: Up the Amazon Chapter 15: A Gothic Man Chapter 16: Fiasco in the Arctic Chapter 17: Ladies and Lapdogs Chapter 18: A Year of Departures Chapter 19: Three Weddings and a Funeral Chapter 20: Waughâs War Chapter 21: The Door to Brideshead Chapter 22: Brideshead Unlocked Keep Reading P.S. Ideas, interviews & features ⦠About the Author The Waugh Generation: Sarah OâReilly talks to Paula Byrne A Writing Life Life at a Glance About the Book Other Worlds by Paula Byrne Read On Have You Read? If You Loved This, You Might Like ⦠Find Out More Coda: âLaughter and the Love of Friendsâ Sources Index About the Author Praise Also by the Author About the Publisher PROLOGUE Early 1944 and Captain Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh has fallen out of love with the army. He has turned forty and is considering his options. To become a screenwriter? An overture to Alexander Korda comes to nothing. To join MI5, the intelligence service? He is turned down without an interview. Only one possibility remains: to revert to his pre-war occupation. On 24 January he writes a letter to Colonel Ferguson, Officer Commanding, Household Cavalry Training Regiment. Copies are sent to the Secretary of State for War and to Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchillâs Minister of Information and string-puller in chief on behalf of Captain Waugh. âI have the honour to request,â the letter begins, âthat, for the understated reasons I may be granted leave of absence from duty without pay for three months.â The understated reasons are various. That his previous service in the Royal Marines, the Commandos, the Special Services and the Special Air Service Regiment does not qualify him for his current position in a mechanised unit of the cavalry. That he no longer has the necessary physical agility for active service. That he is no good at admin, so canât do a desk job. And that he doesnât have the foreign languages to make him useful for the purposes of intelligence work. Assurances are given: the novel to which he will devote his leave âwill have no direct dealing with the warâ. But expectations are dampened: âit is not pretended that it will have any immediate propaganda valueâ. The necessity of immediate action is stressed: âIt is a peculiarity of the literary profession that, once an idea becomes fully formed in the authorâs mind, it cannot be left unexploited without deterioration. If, in fact, the book is not written now it will never be written.â Colonel Ferguson responds by ordering Waugh to go and train the Home Guard at Windsor. A less determined man than Evelyn might have capitulated and the book would never have been written. But he perseveres. By the end of January he has been granted his three monthsâ leave, qualified only by a commitment to a little light part-time work for the Ministry of Information. He leaves his comfortable billet in the Hyde Park Hotel and his military uniform with it. On the morning of Tuesday 1 February 1944 he is settled in another hotel, deep in the West Country: Easton Court, Chagford, Devon â a thatched fourteenth-century farmhouse with low, dark rooms and small windows. He has been there before, in the late autumn of one of the momentous years of his life, 1931. It is a place that in his memory he cannot separate from a house and a family with which he had fallen in love that year. In London he had regularly lain in till mid-morning. At Chagford he is up at 8.30 and at work by 10. By dinnertime on that first Tuesday, though his mind is âstiffâ from the tedium of army life, he has written and rewritten 1,300 words. He reports to his wife that he has made a good beginning on what he calls his âmagnum opusâ. He has âbought a very expensive concoction of calcium and halibut liver oil which the chemist thought would restore me to strength but on reading the label more closely I find it to be a cure for chilblainsâ. This may prove handy, since the lounge he has been given as a private room in which to write has a fire that smokes so badly that he has to choose between streaming eyes and frozen extremities. By âclose of playâ on Wednesday the score is â3,000 words oddâ. Through the ensuing weeks he works steadily at the rate of up to 2,000 words a day, occasionally more. He revises arduously as he goes. In the end it takes him closer to five months than three, but the book that he knows in his heart he has to write is completed. The idea that had âbecome fully formedâ in his mind is âexploited without deteriorationâ. What was that idea? The bookâs original working title was âThe Household of the Faithâ. The story of a household, a family. A journey shaped by religious faith. These are its key themes. But the working title does not find its way into print. When the book is published the following year, its title page reads Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder: A Novel. On the reverse side of that title page there is a notice to the effect that the volume has been âproduced in complete conformity with the authorised economy standardsâ of wartime publishing. You can tell that this is true when you hold a first edition in your hands and turn the coarse, rough-hewn pages. Above the routine announcement concerning production standards, there is something more intriguing. A mysterious Authorâs Note is signed âE. W.â, Evelyn Waugh. It reads: âI am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.â âI am not Iâ: yet Charles Ryder manifestly is Evelyn Waugh.
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