(O'Connor) What a nasty piece of work Erik Langkjaer must be.
AMDG, Janet
Janet --
Indeed. Among ungentlemanly kiss-and-tell stories, I always thought Tony Curtis's assessment of his love scenes with Marilyn Monroe in *Some Like It Hot* ("It was like kissing Hitler") took the cake. But I believe Mr. Langkjaer may have him beat.
Whyever, do you think, did they send her book to Waugh for liner notes? I guess because they were both Catholic? I can't imagine anyone more unlikely to appreciate Miss O'Connor than a man who retains a modicum of taste even when writing a passage about someone finding that he has a severed head in his lap instead of the coconut he was imagining.
Still, they're two of maybe my 5 favorite authors.
AMDG,
Janet
Janet --
That's my guess as well. In 1952, Waugh would have been one of the three great living Catholic novelists (Greene and Mauriac the other two). I wonder if blurbs were solicited from them as well. Don't you suppose that Mauriac would have been the one O'Connor herself would most have liked receiving a compliment from?
I've been reading what she had to say about the two of them and it's obvious that she has nothing but respect for Mauriac. He's one of those people that I say I'm going to read one day. I don't have any of his fiction in the house, which is too bad because I think I'm about to get iced in. Of course, the electricity might go in that case.
She likes Greene, but sees his weaknesses. She says this about him, "What he does, I think, is try to make religion respectable to the modern unbeliever by making it seedy. He succeeds so well in making it seedy that then he has to save it by the miracle." I'm thinking about this statement in the light of her work. It's making me think hmmmmm.
She also says that Mauriac says that nothing tells the truth except fiction. I like this. For some reason I can get more spiritual good out of novels than I ever can out of the writings of Saints. Unless they happen to be novelists who are Saints.
AMDG,
Janet
Do you think that Tony Curtis ever kissed Hitler?
AMDG,
Janet
The only comment of O'Connor's about Graham Greene that I can lay my hands on quickly is this one from *The Habit of Being*:
"As between me and Greene there is a difference of fiction certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she’d bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it; Greene's is something else."
That would seem to give her more in common with Waugh than with Greene -- or Mauriac, for that matter. But O'Connor's comic sense, even if it was rooted in considerations of class just as much as Waugh's was (quite distinct classes, admittedly), still seems very different -- gentler, more charitable than Waugh's, who could be scathing in a way O'Connor never was.
Oh right. It's obvious that she had a great affection for her characters. I'm not sure that Waugh cared for many of his--Cordelia--Guy Crouchback, maybe.
My quote was from "Habit of Being" also.
AMDG,
Janet
My first thought about the Tony Curtis anecdote was "I didn't know Tony Curtis was gay."
As for the review, it's basically a species of snark. I read it as showing not so much a sense that an intelligent, well-read, devout Christian is odd as that a Christian is to be snarked at. It also seems rather lazy.
Yes, lazy, beyond question. (And yet it must have taken a kind of effort to extract only THAT kind of detail from the book.)
But don't you think that the real reason someone like O'Connor merits even snarkiness from the cultural elites is that she was not only a Christian artist but so self-professedly a Christian artist? Giotto, Dante, Michelangelo, even Alexander Pope -- yes, they were Christian, but the true secularist can always convince himself that these figures produced Christian art because that's the only kind of art they were permitted to produce in their day. Flannery O'Connor flamboyantly proclaimed her religion to be the CAUSE of her art, not just the idiom in which she was forced to express herself because of the culture in which she lived. I had a professor in graduate school who, faced with the secularist dilemma of explaining the excellence of O'Connor's fiction, came to the conclusion that she was a great writer in spite of herself -- that the greatness of her work had nothing to do with the Christian themes it consciously embodied, but was rather an achievement in the conventional tradition of Southern gothic, and that the religious element functioned only as "atmosphere," not as the informing spirit of the stories. In essence, he considered O'Connor to be a kind of literary idiot savant, creating art at a level she herself was not aware of or capable of intending.
These are the shapes that modernist literary critics are willing to twist themselves into when confronted with a purposeful and self-aware Christian writer. Flannery O'Connor must be laughing out loud.
Yes, their behaviour makes them kin to the characters in her books.
On Light on Dark Water I was talking, last semester, about my English class in which I was told that there's some question as to whether she's a Christian author. I said that she was a self-professed Christian author--how can you even debate that? I think, though, that my teacher must have been thinking there was a difference between Christian authors, i.e. Tim LaHaye (oh, forgive me mentioning him in the same paragraph as Miss Flannery) and a person who writes book and just happens to be Christian. (And I won't even discuss the man in my class that told me she couldn't have been Christian because she died in 1964 and back then Catholics didn't call themselves Christian.)
Apparently, the sort of thing that you are talking about is THE line that critics take when talking about her work nowadays. I think the poor dears must not have any experience of grace whatsoever. How can you miss it? How can you read her work and see anything else?
AMDG, Janet
I just read Brideshead again. It seems to me that Waugh was not so much simpatico with Cordelia, as using her to express what seems to me his sympathy for Sebastian. Cordelia seems to get Catholicism better than any of the characters, but among the effects of her doing so is our ability to finally see Sebastian's life in the light of grace, and therefore finally to be able to be hopeful for him.
P.S., if what I just wrote doesn't make any sense, I attribute the obscurity to this darned virus captured from my kids that I am unsuccessfully fighting off.
Robert --
You're right about Cordelia. Maybe even more important than the reader's ability to feel hopeful about Sebastian at that point in the novel is Charles's ability to feel hopeful. He's obviously confused about how to regard the emergingly clear trajectory of Sebastian's remaining years, and he defers to Cordelia (because he perceives some spiritual wisdom in her?) to explain it all to him. "How will it end?" he asks her, as if he acknowledges her superior insight into the workings of grace.
Anything like a religious turn of mind Charles's part is only inchoate at that moment in the story, but of course it comes to active life later at Lord Marchmain's deathbed. And it's important that we have some preparation for that moment. The long Charles-Cordelia conversation about Sebastian gives us a bit of that preparation.
Yes, I was thinking I should have put Simon in that group.
AMDG, Janet
I said it gives us hope for Sebastian because I'm presuming that Waugh intends us to look at it all from Charles' perspective. It is Waugh's way of evangelizing the reader by identifying with the narrator.
One things Charles needs to see is that God is not a vindictive meany.
Ack. I can't believe I said Simon instead of Sebastian I've only read it about ten times, given away I don't know how many copies, and watched the BBC version 3 or 4 times. It's my favorite novel. Robert, you comment at Light on Dark Water sometimes, don't you? Did you read any of that months-long discussion we had on Brideshead there?
For Charles to even think that God is a vindictive meany at that point would be a leap of faith, wouldn't it?
I think that conversation is doing much more than giving us (through Charles) hope for Sebastian. I think it turns the whole narrative on its head. Everything that has happened so far is changed in the light of Cordelia's comments. And this is where the Twitch of the Thread comes in which is a foreshadowing of the action of the rest of the book.
I'll have to think a bit about Waugh's affection for Cordelia. I think that he certainly is fond of her when she is a child--later, maybe not.
AMDG, Janet
I don't remember whether I followed the conversation about Brideshead on Light. I have been VERY distracted as of late and am only now beginning to get back on my feet in the Great Conversation. Anyway, I think we are saying the same thing, because I think it is the turning things on its head, the twitch of the thread, is what gives Charles hope for Sebastian and for himself. Although the veil has not been rent for him yet, he now is able to see things from the perspective of someone for whom the veil has been rent.
I'm just a theologian, not a literary critic!
I'm just a retired Catholic homeschool mom, held captive in the butler's pantry of a Protestant seminary.
AMDG,
The question that underlies all these recent comments is, I think, "What character in *Brideshead Revisited* can be seen as 'speaking for Catholicism,' at least from Charles Ryder's perspective?" Yes, certainly, Cordelia helps Charles understand Sebastian at the end. But Sebastian himself has also been a spokesman for Catholicism -- for the unstated, almost unconscious hold it has on its adherents, when he refuses to go along with Charles's assertion that it is all nonsense, despite Charles's confident assumption that Sebastian WILL go along. Bridey also speaks for the Church, perhaps insensitively but beyond question effectively, when he points out to Julia that she and Charles are living in sin. Both Lord and Lady Marchmain are, each in their own way, important representatives of the Faith -- she for her long-suffering devotion, he for his final and obstinately fought-off reconciliation. And Julia herself, in her final act of moral resolve and self-abnegation, teaches Charles a lesson about Christian morality that he has already half learned. (He says, when Julia announces that they must part, that he already knew.)
It says something about Waugh's vision of the Church that he needs so many very different and very odd Catholics to exemplify Her in the novel. Whether or not James Joyce ever really did describe the Catholic Church as "Here comes everybody," it's not a bad phrase to express the dizzying variety of human stories that Catholicism has comprised over the centuries.
"Diversity" before it became a sinister buzzword....
Maybe it's just that the Church speaks for Herself. Charles sees Her effect on all the characters (even, perhaps, the negative that it has on Anthony). It's like light. Scientifically speaking we don't see anything but light reflecting off objects. Each object reflects the light differently, but it's the light that reveals truth to us about what we are seeing. And when we understand the scientific priniciple, we understand the power of the light.
It's only in the light of the Church that Charles, finally can SEE the Marchmains, and then, finally, to comprehend the Truth that explains them.
I think I said that very poorly, but then I never thought about it that way before and it's been a really wearying day.
AMDG,
No, Janet, I think that's put very effectively. It's the explanation for a phenomenon that C.S. Lewis points out somewhere (I'm too tired to look it up) -- something to the effect that sinners are all depressingly alike but the great saints are all amazingly different.
The idea that it is Catholicism itself, as reflected in the various characters, that speaks to Charles reminds me of a question I had intended to ask the young people in my discussion group, but never got around to it: Is the sanctuary light a character in the book?
Have to think about that. Is Nanny Hawkins's room a kind of chapel for the younger Flytes? Are those red and gold fire buckets on the stairs a type of sanctuary light?
AMDG,
What kind of a discussion group is it, Robert?
AMDG,
Robert --
Interesting question. I'm pretty sure He Whom the sanctuary light symbolizes IS a character in the novel.
So, perhaps, are "the old knights who see it from their tombs."
"He Whom the sanctuary light symbolizes IS a character in the novel." Oh, heck yeah. He's the one that baits the hook.
AMDG,
We have six high school juniors and seniors that meet once a month to discuss a novel. Love2Learn Mom's daughter, "Ria," is one of them. So far we've discussed Napoleon of Notting Hill, by Chesterton, Til We Have Faces, by Lewis, Joan of Arc, by Twain, Strong Poison, by Sayers, The Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien, The Song of Bernadette, by Werfel, and Brideshead. We are going to discuss Kristin Lavransdatter (which is why I keep posting on that on my blog) and one of the Jeeves books, just for the fun of it. We meet for two hours and have pizza or sundaes or some other delicacy.
That sounds great. I used to do history and literature with the high school students in our co-op and I really miss it. Most of all, I miss reading with my youngest daughter, who, unbelievably, will graduate from TAC in about 14 months.
AMDG,
Aha! I see you do not like my book. Well, that's ok, but you said something that interests me. You don't like the characters--there is no one you'd like to emulate. I guess, for me, it's not really about the characters. It's about the Church. The Church is the heroine of the novel. She's my favorite heroine.
Lavrans IS a great character.
AMDG,
Actually, Brideshead has grown on me somewhat simply by this discussion. I think if I were in a different place personally, I might like a book like Brideshead better. Perhaps not. I really am a dinosaur with little real sympathy for modern angst and all that.
It's true that people who have to scrape, scrabble, and scrooge for their daily bread don't have enough time for angst; and even those of us who are continually short of time, and overwhelmed with things to do have it a lot easier than people in previous ages. Still, isn't there a sort of horrid poverty attached to a person who has nothing to do with his life but to suit himself (Oh my goodness, it's so delightful to be able to use masculine pronouns without fear of reprisal.)? There's a line in the Ang Lee version of Sense and Sensibility that made me start thinking about that--how terrible it would be to live like that. It seems like a person in that situation would be captive to his emotions in a magnified sort of way.
AMDG, Janet
Yup.
Janet --
Two points:
1. How perceptive of you to realize that the Thursday Night Gumbo combox is an inclusive-language-free zone. Use all the masculine pronouns you want.
2. You rightly observe that "even those of us who are continually short of time and overwhelmed with things to do have it a lot easier than people in previous ages." That's one of those truths that are so true they're invisible to most people. I was thinking along these lines last week when the Vatican came in for a great deal of snickering and eye-rolling because of its suggestion that the washing machine probably "liberated" more women than the pill. Laundering clothes by hand is harder work than almost anybody nowadays can imagine, and being freed from the necessity of doing it -- endlessly -- may indeed have been more authentically "liberating" for women than suddenly finding themselves regarded as convenient sexual partners for men who don't want to father children by them.
Today in Greek class, I translated anthropos as man, and the professor said I should say man and woman. I said that since I was the offended party in this case I could translate it that way if I wanted. Everybody laughed (there's only one other woman in the class). You can get away with a lot if you can make people laugh. If it had been a woman professor, I wouldn't have gotten away with it though.
AMDG,
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