All I know about this book is that it has a n alphabetic list of EW’s characters with descriptions and some analysis.
It is some Chinese site, and you cannot view the whole text at once as a txt file.
The first edition can be found on-line here.
No wonder that Waugh’s mind returned to the topics raised in this early book when he came to write the story of an artist’s conversion to Catholicism in Brideshead. In 1928 Holman Hunt stands as a counter-example to Clive Bell in knowing ‘no valid distinction between beauty of picture and beauty of subject’; two decades later, quoting Bell, Sebastian Flyte makes the same point to Charles Ryder.
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The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography by Douglas Lane Patey |
Cross-dressing
Before World War I, aesthetic figures like Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke had expressed their independence from the Establishment by wearing more color and softening the silhouette of their clothes. They wore soft turn-down collars and enormous ties. In the twenties, playwright and songwriter Noel Coward indulged in “a long suppressed desire for silk pyjamas and underclothes” after the roaring success of his first play, The Vortex, in 1924. He also took to wearing “coloured turtle-neck jerseys, actually more for comfort than for effect, and soon I [Coward] was informed by my evening paper that I had started a fashion.”
While men pampered themselves and softened up their wardrobes, some women went for a harsher look.
Look what showed up in the mail today!
I am still checking my mailbox nervously every day. Mail works slowly where I live.
Hip, funny Milagro de los Santos thinks she’s finally found love and a home at the California ranch of fabulous Oswald Grant and his urbane relatives, who have a rare genetic disorder that some call vampirism. But Milagro is bewildered when she’s excluded from an ancient and mysterious midnight ceremony whose participants include Oswald’s unfriendly parents, a creepy family elder, and Milagro’s ex-lover, the powerful and decadent Ian Ducharme. What skeletons are the vampires keeping in their designer closets?
When Milagro’s life is threatened by a rogue family member, she flees to the desert to hide. Instead of solitude, she encounters an egomaniacal actor, a partying heiress, a sly tabloid reporter, and a lavish spa full of dark secrets — all of which might help her find a way home.
The book has one mention of Brideshead Revisited and specifically Sebastian in it.
My favorite taqueria was about six blocks away, in a mishmash of cafes, restaurants, bars, and small shops. Because my paperback hadn’t dried, I needed a book. I thought about getting another Bronte novel but discovered a used hardback of Waughs BridesbeadRevisited.
I took my tacos and horchata back to Mercedes’s and read while I ate. This solitary activity usually brought me joy, but my mind kept drifting from the character Sebastian Flyte to the Sebastian I knew, SLIME. Sometimes life intrudes on fiction that way. Sebastian had been so beautiful and clever that I never sensed the corruption at his core. I’d thought that love would overcome the differences of class and culture.
Reading about Sebastian Flyres descent into depravity made me mourn SLIME’s descent into amorality.
Disturbing thoughts were scurrying like beetles around my brain, bringing in crumbs of information. I brushed rhem away, resisting the idea that I might be similarly deluded with Oswald.
It was late when I spackled on nighrtime makeup and sprayed and gooped my hair until it had doubled in volume.
At the very tip of Cape Cod, twenty miles out to sea, a gigantic full moon was rising pumpkin orange and peeking over the rolling sand dunes encircling Provincetown Harbor. The enormous swollen moon dwarfed the village where twinkling lights reflected in dark water, and crickets hiding in the eel grass droned pulsating love songs. This was the Blue Moon, twice full in one month and two men stood on the deck of their summer cottage enjoying the twilight. Val leaned in close to Gyles neck playfully nibbling at his lover s ear and whispering, The Blue Moon is red-orange; everyone s in drag in Ptown. Or at least wearing a mask, this is Carnival week. replied Gyles encircling Val s taut waist in both his arms. The Mermaid and the Sailor is a romantic romp set in Provincetown and the third book of the Glamour Galore trilogy. This brings to a conclusion the saga begun with the Boston mystery, The Family Jewels followed by that legendary farce, Naughty Astronautess in which our heroine, Diva La Strange became the first drag queen astronaut.
One of the characters in the book has a teddy-bear named Sebastian Flyte.
Castle Howard, Yorkshire, England — Brideshead Revisited and the Ladder of Love
Excerpts from Letters to a Young Catholic, by George Weigel
Castle Howard in Yorkshire has been home to descendants of the fourth duke of Norfolk for more than three hundred years. This masterpiece of architecture, decoration, and landscaping is set in a thousand-acre park, replete with rolling lawns, lakes, a magnificent rose garden, and a great fountain; the fountain’s centerpiece is a Portland stone rendition of Atlas holding the earth on his shoulders. The main building, crowned by an ornate dome, borders three sides of a large landscaped courtyard. Going inside, you’ll find Chippendale and Sheraton furniture, paintings by Gainsborough, Holbein, Joshua Reynolds, and Peter Paul Rubens, and statuary gathered from ancient Greece and Rome. Castle Howard got a lot of attention in the early 1980s when it was used in filming Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited. And while it seems that this remarkable country estate was only one of several models for the fictional “Brideshead,” home to the aristocratic Flyte family, that really doesn’t matter. What counts is what happened in a place like this, in Evelyn Waugh’s deeply Catholic imagination.
[Waugh] had made Sebastian Flyte’s mother, Lady Marchmain, read it out loud of an evening. With her “beautiful voice and great humour of expression” she solaces her family as they try to come to terms with Sebastian’s alcoholism. She reads from it “with great spirit until ten o’clock,” and continues on a later evening.
RIP was Richard Pares, a history scholar at Balliol, and the subject of Evelyn’s first love affair. With fair hair and blue eyes…
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Evelyn Waugh: a biography, by Selina Hastings. Unfortunately, this is the only bit of the book available through Google Books, so I cannot quote further (until the book arrives in the mail at least). |
Christopher Hollis’ Oxford in the Twenties (1976) is the book in which Richard Pares and Alastair Graham were first named as Waugh’s Oxford lovers.
Father Brown said something like I caught him (the thief) with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.
On the dust jacket of the original 1944 edition of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh described the purpose of the novel as: nothing less than an attempt to trace the working of a Divine Purpose in a pagan world. In his prologue to a revised version, published in 1960, he described the theme of Brideshead Revisited as: the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters. The quotation from Queer Feet, therefore, may be seen as encapsulating the central theme of the novel: Waugh’s belief in God’s inestimable power to instigate, and restore, faith; thus offering salvation to sinners.
