Birthday boys Waugh & Greene
Davis, Robert Murray
BIRTHDAY BOYS Robert Murray Davis Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene might have enjoyed the superfluity of ironies attendant on the respective celebrations of Waugh's centenary at Oxford during the...
...Other presentations used Pavel's theory of myth to illuminate major themes in Sword of Honour, and queer theory was invoked for, and sometimes imposed on, Brideshead in some valiant attempts to allow for the coexistence of homosexuality and Catholicism...
...Greene's festival, which takes place where he said, over and over, his childhood was lost, is organized, supported, and for the most part attended by even worthier people who live in and around the town that he seemed to regard with distaste and tried to escape in person if not in his fiction...
...Waugh, a writer who sought to establish himself firmly in the English countryside, is honored primarily by the efforts of Americans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and others...
...The Waugh conference participants were housed not in splendid rooms filled with flowers and objets d'art but in rooms that very much resembled American dormitories...
...Berkhamsted is far more charming than one would gather from Greene's accounts...
...It was there, according to a short autobiographical essay Greene published in Commonweal ("The Revenge," January 14,1955), that he first learned about the ambiguities of spying and betrayal...
...Participants could get a view, not provided in Brideshead, of the maintenance needed to keep Oxford's dreaming spires upright...
...The Waugh conference ended with a discussion of the future status of his work...
...At Berkhamsted, Greene's religion got far more attention, partly because of the showing of films of Monsignor Quixote and The Heart of the Matter...
...The first was organized by an American professor-two strikes already, in Waugh's view-and attended for the most part by worthy people who had come a long way...
...Perhaps Waugh would have found it odd that, except for one panel and a few incidental remarks, little mention was made of religion in his novels...
...Oxford, however, was filled with tourists-term had not begun- and seemed very unlike the idyllic and almost pastorally empty scenes of Brideshead...
...Enough young people seem to be working on Waugh-and far more people reading him, judging from the number of citations in the popular press- to ensure his survival...
...Greene's fans were provided with a brochure, well mapped, of "The Graham Greene Trail," and given a tour of Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended and where his father was headmaster...
...Both celebrations had aspects of pilgrimage...
...Waugh's home, and the Lygons' Madresfield Court, with its Art Nou-veau chapel, were well worth the visit...
...The Waugh contingent was trotted past sites mentioned in Brides-head Revisited and went to Campion Hall, Piers Court (where Waugh lived from 1937 to 1956), Madresfield Court, home of the Lygon family who furnished the template for the aristocratic Flyte family, and Castle Howard, the television setting of Brideshead Castle...
...The only don in view could have been supplied by central casting-weedy, tweedy, bristling ginger moustache, bicycle clip on each ankle...
...BIRTHDAY BOYS Robert Murray Davis Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene might have enjoyed the superfluity of ironies attendant on the respective celebrations of Waugh's centenary at Oxford during the last weekend of September and the sixth annual Graham Greene Festival at Berkhamsted, Greene's hometown, the first weekend of October...
...Aloyisius...
...Still, most of the conference was devoted to scholarly presentations, most of surprisingly high quality and many of those from young scholars or at least far younger than veteran Waugh enthusiasts such as Donat Gallagher, George McCartney, and Alain Blayac...
...Particularly interesting were papers reconsidering the unjustly neglected novel Helena, which took seriously the art as well as the themes of the novel...
...He would relish the irony, especially given his notorious prejudices about "foreigners...
...Two papers also addressed the subject...
...He could have benefited from the ministrations of Monsignor Roderick Strange, who once gave a course in Catholic doctrine and practice to accompany a literature course at Oxford, and who spoke at Greene's memorial service...
...gners...
...The Spread Eagle at Thame, where the flamboyant Anthony Blanche takes Brideshead's protagonist, Charles Ryder, seemed, like Oxford in Blanche's absence, entirely prosaic...
...One was given by a Protestant who did not understand or did not agree with the theology behind the sacrament of confession...
...Piers Court was denuded in Waugh's move to Combe Florey, but its gardens are being extended beyond even his rococo dreams...
...And those who stayed over until Sunday could attend a Solemn High Mass, in Latin, at St...
Vol. 130 • November 2003 • No. 19
