[HN Gopher] Evelyn Waugh's Decadent Redemption
___________________________________________________________________
Evelyn Waugh's Decadent Redemption
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 19 points
Date : 2025-04-11 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (libertiesjournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (libertiesjournal.com)
| musictubes wrote:
| Liberties is a great journal. It covers a lot of intellectual
| ground and is unapologetically Liberal in all senses of the word.
| Every issue has political and historical commentary, art
| (literary, film, dance) criticism, and poetry. It's like a denser
| Harper's.
| K7mR2vZq wrote:
| Waugh's journey from satire to orthodoxy mirrors many tech
| careers--from disruptive iconoclasm to seeking deeper principles.
| His ability to maintain literary excellence while embracing
| traditionalism reminds us that technical maturity often involves
| integrating seemingly contradictory values rather than merely
| overturning established systems.
| dhosek wrote:
| His journey doesn't really follow that pattern though. _The
| Loved One_ , a deeply iconoclastic satirical novel came after
| _Brideshead_.
| ewgoforth wrote:
| The movie is pretty good too. Jonathon Winters in a dual row.
| dhosek wrote:
| Oh God no, that movie is a horrid mess. It's why Waugh's
| novels were never adapted by Hollywood studios after that.
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| What of it? The Loved One (1948) was a bit of a squib at
| best, tonally a throwback to the earlier Waugh. It's not very
| good (imho) so you can see why Terry Southern - who had not
| much taste - liked it enough to make a film of it, also
| unsuccessful.
|
| The Sword of Honour Trilogy written over the next decade or
| so is much more representative of the later Waugh: the
| original article has sketched him out correctly.
|
| The general continuity in Waugh's life and writing is
| contempt for modernity: a turn to religion makes perfect
| sense in that light.
|
| The diaries are worth reading too. He really was quite an
| unpleasant fellow, as well as a fine writer.
| cafard wrote:
| Paul Fussell (I think) said that one should read Waugh's
| letters rather than his diaries: he wrote the letters in
| the morning, sober, and wrote the diaries at night, drunk.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I really like this book and while not catholic I'm close enough
| that the experiences and decisions of the characters are
| comprehensible to me, which probably helps.
|
| The article mentions this briefly but many don't, and they
| downplay it significantly even here. The first act of this book
| is _extremely_ homoerotic. Like it is a clear depiction of a
| chaste but certainly romantic love between these two young men.
| But it is _also_ a friendship based on normal-for-the-time-and-
| place male camaraderie and college antics.
|
| It's a nuanced and sophisticated depiction, not apparently trying
| to make any moral or ethical point about it and the book has a
| small but devoted following among contemporary gay men for this.
| Nor is this even plausibly deniable as a "sappho and her friend"
| type accident on the author's part, since homosexuality is pretty
| explicitly (though euphemistically) referenced elsewhere in the
| book. IMO one of the best depictions of a romance of its kind in
| modern literature. It's fascinating that it's here.
| philsnow wrote:
| > Why, oh why, must the love stories fail?
|
| Well, Julia's (and then Charles's) love for God prevails, in the
| end.
|
| On the face of it, it's not a story where the guy gets the girl,
| as such. However, there is a sense where Jesus is the bridegroom
| of the Church, and thus it is that kind of story, just not the
| way that readers expect (well, as Oliver points out, until they
| read the title of the section "The Twitch on the Thread").
| danielhanlon wrote:
| How unexpected - beautifully written! It's almost surprising that
| the quoted passages are so familiar - I hadn't realised how
| affecting they are. Whilst loving the book I can't consider
| Brideshead Revisited without thinking of the wonderful 1980s
| Granada TV adaptation. I didn't dare watch the more recent film,
| lest it spoil the tableaux of the original.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-11 23:01 UTC)