Word: brideshead
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...Older brother of Novelist Evelyn (Brideshead Revisited) Waugh...
Burdick had looked vainly for the early '20s Oxford of Novelist Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited') where the "subtly homosexual youth . . . carries his teddy bear about St. John's Quad . . . boys roar out into the country in Bentley roadsters, and over Cointreau and plovers' eggs have some dazzling conversations "about God and Truth." But, said Burdick, "Times have changed since Waugh was here. The Oxford homosexual today has neither wittiness nor creative eccentricity to recommend him . . Parties revolve around gin and orange which is, beyond question, one of the most barbaric drinks that any people ever accepted...
...Flytes of Brideshead were a doomed family. They were Catholics in an alien community. The Flytes' Catholicism could not save them from a doom enjoined by the interaction of their characters on one another and the modern world. But it could save them from dissolution in their doom. That was the real meaning of Brideshead Revisited-that Catholicism was the one force that could still give order and unity to fragmented lives...
Waugh himself now regards Brideshead as a failure, a task beyond his powers. But readers were perhaps more right than the critics. The book has an elegiac beauty, like a bell tolling in a solitary church, where no one comes...
...Oxford, Waugh's flight from the bourgeoisie was furthered. Evelyn became one of a mauve circle of which glittery, willowy Harold Acton was the titular Tiresias. Says Acton, who is supposed to have modeled for one of the more exotic characters in Brideshead, in his Memoirs of an Aesthete (recently published in England): "An almost inseparable boon companion at Oxford was a little faun called Evelyn Waugh. Though others assure me that he has changed past recognition, I still see him as a prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. His wide-apart eyes, always ready to be startled...