The cult of young manhood

...It essays genre-painting, and the great law of that form is harmony...

...and in 1939 welcomed the outbreak of war as much as Archy in 1914...

...What did Sebastian feel for Charles...

...The audience eagerly agrees with Frank, who won't "go to fight for the British Empire...

...There must be a touch of falsetto to lines like "Darling Papa, how young you are looking...

...All three are about English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, young men, and importantly related to the Great War and its historical resonance...

...we are allowed to love him, via Charles, only because he is doomed...

...And it is not an adventure also because its stress falls often on personal relations, between mates, with sentiments taken seriously...

...Eric Liddell was not exactly a man of the nineteenth century, but he was of a generation still in unbroken line with that century, harmoniously developed from David Livingstone's knowing no such break as separated Charles Ryder and Sebastian from their fathers...

...in the most literal terms, he will destroy himself...

...It is perhaps a weakness in Gallipoli that Archy shows no real promise of manhood...

...Don't you think my father very handsome, Charles...

...an ap-preciator, no doubt, someone clever enough to get the point of Sebastian's performance, but ultimately just an adorer...

...He is at his most solid with his eyes fixed trustingly on someone older, imbibing manhood from an outside source, in the first scene from gruff Uncle Jack...

...It shows them England dreaming of her past, England fifty years ago, when it chose dreaming...

...some worse than anything in the other film...

...And of course the passion and intelligence are in some sense nonsensical...

...That is what we are told, in book and film...

...These are the treasure houses of centuries of European empire, now temporarily exculpated by the end of that empire, briefly becalmed in an Indian summer before the deluge...

...It is strange to us, and was in a way strange to his own times, the 1920s...

...in Gallipoli it is caricatured as war - a juggernaut, a monstrosity...

...Here it is of course the Roman Catholic church, which, Sebastian assures Charles, teaches the opposite of everything natural and agreeable...

...But of course that is what he must have, as he must have adventure...

...Thus Chariots of Fire is closer to the realistic novel than to the adventure legend...

...Hence Archy is determined to seek adventure, which was the great ritual of that religion, the rite by which one achieved manhood...

...But if we are to believe in the friendship, Charles should surely project a sturdier common sense, a grosser drive to survive and succeed, a promise of protection...

...His uncle, the reader of Kipling, has had adventures (the Barbary Coast, the Spice Islands), which is the source of his authority...

...Abrahams says he runs like a wild beast...

...There are many irrelevant ingenuities and elegancies of film making, the running slowed up and repeated, and the behavior often intolerably affected (Ab-rahams's financee is the worst...

...Nowadays such a legend is cut off from the cultural support systems it had then, and is more purely an aesthetic phenomenon...

...He is entirely ephebic, with his broad-brimmed hat and loose-limbed gestures and loping, sloping gait - defined by the contrast with Frank's cocky swagger...

...we are shown what we are shown for its period charm...

...That was when the cult of young men reached its climax in England...

...The "affirmation" that carries some authority relates just to the death-directed beauty of young men, like the affirmation of Gallipoli, and the potential affirmation of Chariots of Fire...

...What is it like to believe that God revealed his truth to a Christian church, and that his truth forbids games and sports on Sundays - that God is a God of negations...

...The importance of the war is of course explicit in Gallipoli...

...Frank is clearly destined for manhood - we don't mind him growing coarse...

...And what did this friendship amount to...

...And it is not a mere coincidence that Frazer's volume of anthropology with that title should have been a highbrow best seller in the years just before and after the War...

...I'm thinking of Gallipoli, Chariots of Fire, and Brideshead Revisited...

...The plot might be compared with Stevenson's Kidnapped, the theme with Lord Jim, Rupert Brooke, the Shropshire Lad, Pater's Emerald Uthwart...

...He beautifully embodies an idea of manliness about which we may well feel nostalgic...

...MARTIN GREEN teaches in the English department of Tufts University in Massachusetts...

...But the spirit of the three - where they are successful - is not social-historical...

...When one thinks of England today, what does such an elaborate production, with such a galaxy of talent and such a lavishness of taste, mean...

...but Jack knows he cannot hope to convince Archy...

...the thrust of Kiplingesque literature, of the public school ethos, of the universities, of the empire...

...It seems that out there, in the film studios,' people are still interested in images of young men...

...This is a mode of manliness uncrippled by Gallipoli, reaching back to before 1914, before Archy Hamilton, before Kipling...

...For three-hundred years the death of the British aristocracy has been announced by those in touch with the times...

...When we hear him actually preaching, it is hard to pay attention to the words, because our attention is all directed to his voice, so simple and modest and manly...

...He cannot enter manhood...

...it is the characteristic of aristocracies everywhere in democratic societies to seem always on the point of succumbing...

...THIS LITTLE anachronism is quite in accord with Waugh's intentions...

...These frills have nothing to do with the adventure of running, or with serious social history...

...The representative of Dissent's temperamental severity and moral enthusiasm is Eric's sister...

...So he did the opposite, and made wonderful nonsense out of them...

...It hams up the heroic effort and competition of sports, but its inner discourse is social and psychological - about the inner problems of the two men...

...The inner tensions of a man who has to win, and his sufferings as a Jew at Cambridge...

...Waugh could not make good sense out of his contrary perceptions...

...Of course his feeling for Archy is as romantic as anything in a novel proper...

...That revolt was by and large unconscious before 1914, conscious after...

...The fairy tale splendor of first Oxford, then Brideshead, then Venice, is the largesse of empire, the heritage of heroic adventurers, undeserved by languid Charles and Sebastian...

...But its realism is of the minor-key nostalgic kind...

...This production is about all that history, too, all that sumptuousness and weariness, of the years after Brideshead as well as those before...

...That is the question the subject asks, but the film ignores...

...Perhaps this indicates an interesting split in the cultural organization of our sensibility...

...What Sebastian was looking for was another nanny...

...Waugh loved Sebastian and Oxford decadence...

...Nothing seems to matter to the makers of Chariots of Fire...

...But it is also rooted in realpolitik facts of economic power - in plunder...

...But it is shown how that vulgar skepticism is vanquished by Archy's radiant naivete...

...Archy is an Australian aristocrat - a toff and a cavalry man - but he is also an angel, the promise of the class system redeemed...

...Ar-chy's parents simply don't count, because they have not had adventures...

...There should be an edge of outrageousness, of overrefinement, of refusing normality and maturity, to his manner...

...As such, it denies empire, but not in the name of any vision of simplicity and innocence...

...though perhaps my surprise is provincial, and due to my being immured in an English department...

...but in fact he is too tasteful...

...What does "serious social history" amount to in this film...

...The alternative to dreaming, the alternative to fantasy, was always the weakest thing Waugh had to offer...

...But we are never asked to imagine what such a belief means, what a gulf separates that way of thinking from any a film-audience wants for itself...

...Lindsay is of course a figure out of Brideshead Revisited, and he is much better done than Abrahams and the rest...

...A confederate, of course...

...Now we are dreaming of dreaming...

...Waugh gives us nothing but charnel house chills blowing out of those marble vaults...

...He was thirty-five years previous - perhaps more - perhaps there'll always be a Brideshead...

...He is too good to be true, too exquisite to merely survive, too fine to be allowed to coarsen, harden, toughen with experience...

...The same promise is given us about Sebastian in Brideshead...

...His throwing his head back as he finishes is perhaps intended to intimate fanaticism...

...The production stresses this effect of general sumptuousness, to the point of blurring important distinctions between, for instance, the two fathers, between Mr...

...Archy is perfect in his courage and patriotism...

...Such languor, such elegance of gesture and posture, such entwinings, such glancings and broodings of empathy and shared silence...

...Gallipoli expresses the sensibility of the age of Kipling almost, unmodified...

...Everything mattered a great deal to him...

...The film does not want to see him embody it - its ultimate suggestion is that he is worth something better than manhood...

...in Chariots of Fire it is diminished as sport, a tamed and domesticated adventure...

...What is wrong with Chariots of Fire as social history becomes clear as soon as we think of Brideshead Revisited...

...what he is saying seems to be all a quotation, offset on the page, an example, or something from outside the performance...

...What does it say to the immigrant Pakistanis at cafeteria cash registers, and the West Indian bus drivers, and the Ugandans getting diplomas at technical colleges...

...and at the same time he recoiled from it in grief, and even horror...

...Archy and Sebastian have no inner problems...

...but there is hardly a hint of that in what we see...

...The feeling of danger, of intoxication, comes from many sources...

...But the production glides over such realism like one of its own gondolas...

...the boy's purity of feature and skin is a visual pun on race - we could appreciate it by saying that he is of pure race, purely Anglo-Saxon...

...Or it would be if it succeeded...

...In a few static shots Archy is sculpturally beautiful, solid, substantial...

...When he wrote the book he expected the aristocracy and its great houses to disappear immediately after the war, but he recognized later that he had miscalculated their endurance...

...For despite its gestures at social history, that film's melting glances between Abrahams and Aubrey, and the opening and closing shots of young men running together, carry that meaning more powerfully than anything else...

...When Frank offends his comic cohorts in the infantry by joining Andy in the Light Horse, we take seriously their feelings of being betrayed, as we would not in a real adventure...

...The production is deeply in harmony with Waugh, and may be said to have fallen prey to Sebastian's charm as much he did...

...and Charles was something of a baby-snatcher, his predatory appetites aroused by so much helpless beauty...

...This particular similarity between the two stories reveals the deeper legend in which they are both rooted, that of Adonis, Attis, Osiris...

...Charles Ryder/Waugh, on the other hand, did seek out adventure later...

...But in Brideshead Christianity stands only for death...

...and the conscience struggles of a man called to both Puritanism and to sports...

...As soon as we see Archy Hamilton's rose-petal face fill the screen, the title just fading from it, we know that whoever else may survive the battle, he will not...

...every potentiality of the subject is sacrificed to that, every poignancy and thrill subdued to reconcile it with the nostalgic tone of the whole...

...because, however different, war is also the same - is the greatest adventure of them all...

...Perhaps the very employment of Olivier and Gielgud obliterates that meaning...

...But in movement and emotion he loses that substantiality, he ducks his head, his face cracks in dazzled laughter, his features blur in a rosy flush...

...But who is the audience...

...Ryder's Bays water and Marchmain House...

...Chariots of Fire, we might say, should be about similar themes, but is not...

...What the film says, in effect, is, "If it makes him so beautiful, it must be true...

...It is a weakness typical of the film that, though so keen on cultural contrasts of a magaziny kind, it does not explore this one...

...While about the second the crucial question is never asked...

...symbolically, he will melt into Julia...

...What could be more platitudinous than the first - what could more flatly flatter our self-esteem than to watch John Gielgud being anti-Semitic at high table...

...Thus the landscape is potentially heroic in Gallipoli (especially the desert) but not really heroic as in a serious West: ern, because this is not fully an adventure, and its central characters are not fully heroes, not fully men...

...They certainly aren't, in here...

...they exist so intensely, indeed primarily, as romantic images for other people - and for themselves, if we try to imagine them as real - that they do not deal in the usual complexities and compromises of self-discovery and self-definition...

...but she has no authority - she is just a sweet, obstinate mouse, dressed or drowned in period costume...

...Sebastian is played very well, and avoids the most vulgar error, which would be effeminacy...

...They would have better suited a fantasy-history of the Brideshead kind...

...It shows them the plunder, and the bemusement of the plunder's guardians...

...How can such a faith inspire a mode of manliness as easy, as warm, as vigorous, as attractive, as Liddell's...

...Indeed, the film undermines its own cynicism, gives it up, in that shining presence...

...His intelligence and sensibility served both those contrary emotions, treasuring up the details and elaborating the conceits that satisfy them both...

...Charles is after all struck dumb in Sebastian's presence, limited to submissive and responsive roles...

...they are not partial or transitional selves, involved in becoming, they are all being, and can only be broken...

...He has been taught this Sabbatarianism, and he won't change his conduct at the behest of even the Prince of Wales...

...That he won't run on Sunday is a big turn in the plot, but thematically it is named merely as integrity...

...Then the weight of civilization was behind that legend of beauty and death...

...while Sebastian is determined not to become a man...

...His books include The Challenge of the Mahatmas and, most recently, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (Basic Books...

...and Liddell himself says he runs for the Lord, and feels God's pleasure when he runs...

...they had returned to the cult of manhood...

...One would like to hear Anthony Blanche's comment on it...

...and in Brideshead it is defied - the young men do not run, they lounge - "We lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves overhead, mine on his profile" - though their idyll is framed, cut out, cut off, by episodes of that later war in which Charles plays a manly part...

...Of course genre-painting has its virtues, and the best of them is represented by the performance of Eric Liddell, the Scottish runner...

...Sebastian is perfect in' his taste and charm...

...Putting the three together, I am surprised...

...Archy involuntarily attracts the hostility of the true cynic - the man who makes him race barefoot...

...The film stays much further outside Liddell's life than Abrahams's...

...Perhaps that is one of the great truths for art to tell England now...

...He had a very keen eye for significant types and behavior styles - those that '' represent the times.'' (More exactly, he named the types and behavior which corresponded to a mood people felt in response to historical facts and forces...

...Uncle Jack tells him that war is different, and the film, the audience, thinks sp too...

...The slaughter of young men at Gallipoli and elsewhere in that war drove the survivors to make a cult of their own youth - a cult which reached a climax, if also a caricature, in Sebastian Flyte's cult of his childhood, his parading of his teddy bear at Oxford...

...Sebastian commanded the fealty of friends like Charles Ryder because they too despised reality and realism, but only he had found a gesture with which to mock them...

...The cult of young manhood was a minor revolt against the cult of manhood - the great secular religion of the nineteenth century...

...Both seem equally grand and strange, though there should lie between them the crucial gulf that separates the middle class from the aristocracy...

...where nowadays every idea and urgency has to do with the image of women, the role of women, the destiny of women - where every student's special topic seems to be in defense of Virginia Woolf or Jean Rhys...

...Such a vision would make sense out of those episodes in which Charles speaks of his failed religious training while the camera shows us gorgeous facades and cupolas and flights of marble steps down into fountains and canals...

...If we imagine that pressure to connect manly beauty with patriotic death, and then imagine the experience of the Great War, we shall understand why Waugh and his generation rebelled, and why Sebastian and his generation were "decadent...

...There is such a vision in Christianity - let us call it Quaker Christianity - which denies all jeweled and marmoreal splendor, ecclesiastical as well as secular...

...But that never interested Waugh...

...it follows orthodox class-lines - the tough, knowing city boy, with a touch of the lout, meets a shining knight of the schoolroom virtues, a prince of the copybook maxims come down to earth...

...These infinitely accomplished actors, offering us a reading of each line like a chocolate out of a box of possible readings, and trailing behind them the velvet and ermine, the Stars and Garters of their triumphant careers, bring the history of fifty years of British theater into the story...

...Of course, there are atrocious vulgarities in Brideshead...

...What the film brings out more than the book is the theme of imperialism - only as background music, of course, but important...

...What that is positive could Charles mean to him...

...THE performance is very fine but the actor - no doubt because of the direction - softens the edges of Liddell's type...

...That imminence is only implicit in Chariots of Fire and Brideshead Revisited, but it is nevertheless important...

...It is a keen passion for the beauty and poignancy of ephebes which links image to image - these are celebratory legends from the cult of young manhood...

...Born in China, into a missionary family, and returning to a Dissenting Sabbatarian, teetotal culture, he is radically unlike the Cambridge young men he runs against...

...The poignancy of the stories derives from the imminence of the Great War, past or future...

...In fact the best inoment in the film is when Lord Lindsay, in front of his stately home and beside an ornamental lake, practices hurdling with a brimming glass of champagne on each hurdle...

...He has put his faith in manhood...

...I was drowning in honey," Charles says, and so is the audience...

...Here are stories which exclude, or relegate to peripherality, mothers and fathers, wise old men, women in general, even beautiful girls...

...We are allowed our dangerous delight in him only by our promise that he will die...

...This is a, world of aristocratic fantasy Charles en-ters, an escape from bourgeois reality...

...Thus in all three of these stories, adventure is a masked and muzzled presence...

...GALLIPOLI, CHARIOTS OF FIRE, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED The cult of young manhood MARTIN GREEN Suddenly, it SEEMS, we are again accosted by powerful screen images of young men - of the feelings of young men for each other, and of the destinies of young men who represent the whole race...

...There are in fact some intimations in the script that he is a fanatic...

...He never imposes his presence, employs his handsomeness - at the hotel dance, Frank kisses his girl, Archy laughs...