Rosemary Hill | God's Architect | The Grange (2007)

[Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect, Pugin & the Building of Romantic Britain, Allen Lane, Penguin, 2007] “[133] … Pugin intended his home to be a manifesto. It marked the start of a new life, a new profession and a new faith. It was the first demonstration of his vision of the Gothic as a revived, living style. To the astonishment and often undisguised mirth of passers-by a turreted, fortified, red-brick house, apparently blown out of the pages of the book of hours, began to rise rapidly next to the main Southhampton road. The Grange, which though altered still survives, was the fruit of Pugin’s peculiar education, a mixture of Picturesque cottage and fifteenth-century house. In designing it he took the theories of Price and Repton and applied them with a radical logic. …. [133] …. [134] There was no visible door and no window. Not only was the façade blank, it was defended. Between the raised ground floor and the road there was a dry moat with a working drawbridge, overlooked by a watchtower. No other architect, however strictly Picturesque, would have had such a disregard for convention as to present a brick wall to the outside world. But Pugin had no hesitation. It was an eloquent gesture, for his house was both a retreat from the world and an assault on it. 

After his parents’ death Pugin was increasingly prey to nightmares, fear of burglary and other fears, less rational: the paraphernalia of the Gothic, in all its most clichéd forms, ghosts, sleepwalkers and all the assembled terrors of the night. His fortified house expressed his subjective dread, and also his strong streak of self-dramatization. The thickness of the walls, three feet, he told Wilson, the moat, the lookout, were more necessary for his peace of mind than physical safety.

 He went so far as to conceal the well, as was common in the Middle Ages, to prevent tampering by enemies. Like a medieval jewel case, the Grange was rebarbative on the outside while within all was to be richness, intimacy and glowing colour. …. [134] …. Servants, whose kitchen and scullery were on the lower ground floor, would use the same entrance as the family. It was a highly eccentric domestic arrangement. …. [134] .... The high-pitched roofs with gilded weather vanes and cresting, the stone casement windows with mullions instead of wooden sashes, made the house conspicuous and, to many people, ridiculous. Pugin chose red brick because he could not afford stone, and red brick had many medieval precedents, but to most people in Georgian England it was principally associated with modern warehouses and factory workers’ cottages. …. [135] …. This first house was a work of romantic art, a building with which its creator was entirely, subjectively identified. 

 In it Gothic was realized as a total, organizing belief, running through both conception and construction, the appearance of the building and the kind of life that would be lived in it. This, Pugin believed, was what architecture could and should do. It was his own answer to the questions being debated in London about the design of the new Parliament, his personal attempt to mould ‘the intellect of the age’ …. [135] …. In one sense it was not an important building, for it influenced nobody. Ferry thought it ‘tended rather to show the eccentricity of its owner than his superior skill in design’, and even a sympathetic Nikolaus Pevsner diagnosed it as ‘a case of extreme medievalism’ Yet while it remains to some extent a cul-de-sac in English architecture, it was prescient, not least in the elements of its design that seemed most scandalous to Georgian eyes. ….” [135]

Peter Ackroyd | Dickens | Brave New World (1990)

[Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, Sinclair-Stevens, 1990 p343-371] “…. Dickens kept up one continual shout of uproarious laughter as he went rapidly forward, reading the signs on the shops, and observing the ‘architecture’ of the new country into which he had dropped as if from the clouds.” And indeed he might have come from some other world, so familiar and yet so strange was this new country to him: it is a curious fact, confirmed by other English visitors, that America at first seemed too bright, too vivid, and almost artificial in its size. Dickens could do nothing but run around the streets and laugh. He said later that “… every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime”

…. The young man following him in this first uproarious progress remembers how Dickens pulled the bell-handles of the doors as he went past, and he pulled them with such vigour that one actually came off in his hand.” In his American Notes he described these very knobs “so marvelously bright and twinkling”; he could not resist touching them because they seemed to him too bright, unreal, mere props in a wonderful scenic illusion, the colours and shapes of this new world uncannily echoing the exaggerated and colourful backdrops in the London theatres. And then, when he came to the old South Church of Boston, “Dicken’s screamed”. One would give almost anything to have heard that scream – the scream of undiluted pleasure and freedom, of sudden astonishment at the fact that he was actually living and breathing in a world so much like that of the stage on which he always longed to be. He was in a play, and it was also real; nothing could have suited Dicken’s needs more than that. It was like inhabiting one of his own fictions.” [343] …. [348] 
[T]he young Englishman was not always the novelist of American’s imagination. “The very first sight of him may not wholly please you,” Dana writes to William Cullen Bryant, and the President’s daughter observed after meeting him that he was “rather thickset, and wears entirely too much jewellery, very English in his appearance and not the best English …” Someone else noted his “unkempt hair” …. They noticed his shortness, his quick expressive eyes, the lines around his mouth, the large ears, the odd fact that when he spoke his facial muscles slightly drew up the left side of his upper lip …. “… a dissipated looking mouth with a vulgar draw to it, a muddy olive complexion, stubby fingers … a hearty, off-hand manner, far from well-bred, and a rapid, dashing way of talking.” One of these hearty remarks caused something of a scandal, in fact; when at the house of a learned judge Dickens entered an argument about the relative beauty of two ladies he said, “Well, I don’t know, Mrs Norton perhaps is the most beautiful; but the duchess, to my mind, is the more kissable ….” [348] 

[349] …. There was particular comment upon his vivid waistcoats, his jewellery and generally bright “get-up”. “His whole appearance is foppish” one newspaper reported, “and partakes of the flash order.” In other words he was not at all American; ….” [349] …. [353] [H]e was actually being lampooned in public. Certain newspapers, for example, began to speculate … that he was not a gentleman but merely the “son of a Haberdasher”. [354] “I tremble for a radical coming here,” [Dickens] wrote “unless he is a radical on principle, by reason and reflection  … I fear that if he were anything else he would return home a Tory ….” 

He had expected in America to find the conflicts of English life resolved, but in fact the “free press” and the representatives of the people were as dishonest and as hypocritical as anything he had found in his own country. Perhaps even more so:” [354] …. [368] And what he seems to have noticed among them, too, was their hypocrisy and their cant – in that respect his reaction against them was part of his general reaction against America itself …. since there was no other aspect of human beaviour that struck him more forcibly in all these months of traveling. Cant everywhere. Cant in the newspapers. Cant from the self-styled leaders of public opinion. Cant from the businessmen. And did he no, having at first identified himself with this new world, sense a certain amount of hypocrisy within himself? [368] …. 

 [369] What had he found in that country? Everywhere business and money, money and business, …. More enlightened penal and social policies, certainly, but no humour. No laughter [369]. …. [370] He had arrived in America with the determination to attach himself to what he saw as the liberal and progressive aspects of this new world, but it was not long before he saw how mistaken he was; how a new tyranny, that of “public opinion” fostered by a rancid press, had simply usurped older forms of authoritarianism.” [370]

Peter Ackroyd | Dickens | Two Skeletons in a Cupboard (1990)

[Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, Sinclair-Stevens, 1990 p358f] “…. It was that dark and melodramatic aspect of his personality which also made him a wonderful teller of ghost stories. His closest friend, Forster, noticed as much and commented that “such as his interest generally in things supernatural, that, but for the strong restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism.” Sometimes this interest in the supernatural went no further than a kind of morbid jokiness; there was one reported occasion when he placed two skeletons in a cupboard, locked it, and then asked a local carpenter to force open the door, with predictable results.

But there were also times when he seems genuinely to have felt the presence of the uncanny; on two occasions he passed in the shadow of the Burlington Hotel, and on both occasions, so he said, he was invaded by a feeling of numbness and of cold. Yet these responses are perhaps only to be expected in a novelist who delighted in creating mysteries within his fiction, who used all the panoply of Gothic effects when he considered them to be appropriate and who, in a much more general sense, is filled with a morbid poetry of fantasy and death. 

Alexander Blok, the Russian poet, said that “… in reading Dickens I have felt horror, the equal of which Poe himself does not inspire”, and there is no doubt that there was within Dickens consciousness a private world built upon nightmares and fantasies and anxieties which he chose not to reveal to anyone; except, of course, to the readers of his fiction. ….”

 

Waugh | John Osborne | Martin Luther (1962)

(Waugh, ‘Luther: John Osborne’s New Play’, review of Luther by John Osborne, The Critic, 2/1963) “…. Mr Osborne, following his proletarian sympathies, makes much of Luther’s encouragement of the savage repression of the peasants by their overlords. It was an outrage typical of the age and place but it was to some extent provoked. It was quite consistent with Luther’s previous career that he should inflame and exculpate the acts of revenge. If the dramatist wished to show the corruption of his hero’s character he could have drawn on his exhortations to persecute Jews and Anabaptists because there he was denying the principles of private judgment in religious opinion for which he was originally so strong.

 Instead we are given the more commonplace spectacle of revolutionary turned conservative of which, of course, there are numerous historical examples. Luther was never a revolutionary in this way. He was an opportunist politically who saved his skin by supporting the anarchic princes against the homogeneous empire of Christendom. In his dislike of his leading character the dramatist even denies him the convivial, even generous, rumbustious qualities he undoubtedly possessed and makes him a whining, snarling hypochondriac. 

But Mr Osborne’s main weakness is what always enfeebles men without religion when they attempt religious subjects. Mr Osborne simply does not know whether prayer has an object. He sees monastic life as harmless and congenial to certain temperaments, as futile and irksome to others. He does not know if there is a God. A Catholic would agree that the Church needed reformation and point to the Council of Trent as the means God appointed for the process. A Lutheran, presumably, would say that God was displeased by the devotional habits and doctrinal refinements of his worshippers and inspired a group of Germans to start again on a new and better plan.

Mr Osborn does not know whether God is involved in his story. Were the young Luther’s prayers barren because he was following an unsatisfactory liturgy or because all prayer is barren except as auto-suggestion? That is the central problem which Mr Osborne shirks. But when all these defects have been noted it must still be asserted that Luther is a composition altogether more valuable than all the nonsense of the nouvelle vague. It is a piece of stage craft in a sound tradition with many highly exciting and amusing episodes.” (Gallagher D, The Essays Articles & Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Methuen, 1983 p579)

Waugh | Edward Lear | A Victorian Escapist (1938)

[Waugh ‘A Victorian Escapist’ Review of Edward Lear, by Angus Davidson Spectator 6/5/1938’] “…. Most of us had formed an impression of [Edward] Lear which approximates to that of all but the most intimate of his contemporaries – twinkling eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, a wistful smile behind the whiskers, a fund of puns and the art of pleasing children – but for those who cared to look deeper there was always an underlying problem; how was it that a man who possessed in a high degree the first of genuine poetic expression was content to limit them to nursery rhyming? Mr Davidson has provided an answer and at the same time the opportunity for recalling from disrepute a word which, if judiciously used, is of real value in criticism.

A school of critics who see no reality except in the raw materials of civilization have popularized the jargon-word ‘escapism’ as a term to condemn all imaginative work; they hold that the only proper concern of man is buying, selling and manufacturing and the management of these activities in an equitable way; that anyone who interests himself in other things is trying to escape his obligations and his destiny. In consequence of this stultifying misuse a useful word is in danger of being lost as soon as it was born. For ‘escapism’ does represent a reality, and Lear gives a classic example. His disability, now recorded for the first time, was not unique; it was the disability of feeling unique. ….” (Gallagher D, The Essays Articles & Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Methuen, 1983 p231)

Malcolm Venville | 44 Inch Chest (2010)

Louis Mellis and David Scinto, writers of the formidable Sexy Beast (2000) [Director Jonathan Glazer] again collaborate. They have written the script for Malcolm Venville’s 44 Inch Chest (2010). The equally formidable talents of Ray Winston (Gary “Gal” Dove) and Ian McShane (Edward “Teddy” Bass) accompany them. This almost ensures the unreserved devotion to Chest of Beast lovers, which I must confess to be amongst. The opening scene of Chest is redolent of Beast. A corpulent and cadaverous Mr Winston [Colin Diamond] is portrayed lying in the wreckage of his sitting room. The scene is cleverly edited and includes a trembling lap dog below a cracked glass table, almost concealed in the thick white pile. The clever combination of images and music caused me to inflict a slight injury to myself. Violent laughter is a dangerous vice. Fortunately, by a combination of careful breathing and gentle massage I was able to recover and enjoy the film.

Mellis and Scinto appear to have written a tribute to the late Harold Pinter’s film legacy, in particular William Friedkin’s The Birthday Party (1968) and Peter Hall’s, The Homecoming (1973).
Onerous as it is to compare affectionate tributes with the deserving objects of devotion, I cannot help reflecting that the savage invective that has become fashionable in British film [see  Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) In The Loop (2009)] has done much to vitiate such important offerings. 

The joy of the short sharp imprecation is not a vice frequently enjoyed by Pinter; and films of his work remain powerful and shocking. It seems that what is gained in character realism, is inevitably lost in the complexity, grandeur, magic, absurdity and poetry of the spoken word, which is not a mistake that Pinter or Beckett would make, be his character car salesman, bog Irishman, baron or Emily Bronte blue stocking.

  Mellis and Scinto introduce a clever hint of Dennis Potter Surrealism. Joanne Whalley (Elizabeth “Liz” Diamond) immediately memorable as the pretty dream provoking Nurse Mills in Potter's The Singing Detective (1986) appears as a divine obscure object of desire, looking delicious in a little black cocktail dress; and also alludes to the complicated male fear of femininity discussed in the work of both Pinter and Potter.
Interesting to see that Melvil Poupaud [Loverboy] was cast as the English idea of The Frenchman. His cool performance in Francois Ozon’s Le Temps qui reste (2005)
as a fashion photographer "Romain", who has three months to live, was much in my mind as I watched his stoic performance. A luridly coloured Rolls Royce, Samson eyeless in Gaza and other playfully hallucinogenic sequences do much to enliven an otherwise somber, almost Jacobean, morality tale.

Frances Donaldson | Evelyn Waugh | The Edifice

[Frances Donaldson, Evelyn Waugh Portrait of a Country Neighbour, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1967]

“…. When we first knew him [Mr Waugh] he strove against this paralysing boredom in odd ways. He went, as I have said, for walks over very long distances. Twice a week he spent the afternoon in the cinema in Dursley, irrespective, I think, of the film that was showing, once for each change of programme. He entertained himself with grandiose projects in his garden. He built what became known as The Edifice – a semi-circular stone wall about ten feet in height, surmounted with battlements and with a paved area beneath it. When this was finished he advertised for human skulls to adorn the battlements. He received a surprising number of replies, which I doubt he had expected, and he had to refuse most of the offerings. The Edifice was not a great success. Many people thought it hideous and [Mr Waugh] himself was not satisfied with it although he got pleasure from the building. A path in the garden was made by inverting and planting empty champagne bottles, ….” [p23]