Volume 55, Number 15 · October 9, 2008
Evelyn Waugh Revisited
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Brideshead Revisited
a film directed by Julian Jarrold, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh
Holy Week of 1937 found Evelyn Waugh—thirty-three years old, solidly established in his literary career, and on the verge of a second marriage—at a Benedictine monastery in Ampleforth, in Yorkshire, where, as he noted in his diary, he whiled away the time 'entertaining dumb little boys and monks.' It was not his first sojourn with these particular monks. He had come to Ampleforth before, and would come again, with his old friend Alfred Duggan, a stepson of Lord Curzon whom Waugh had first befriended at Oxford, and whose alcoholism the novelist was, with a touching doggedness, trying to cure—not least in the hopes of returning Duggan to the Catholic faith he had abandoned. (Some of these retreats were more successful than others; on one of them, Duggan appeared to be behaving until he suddenly disappeared, only to be discovered later, in the midst of a major binge, in Scarborough.)
Review, 4768 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |