Word: vanbrughs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...laughed in the face of reality ever since. His new novel, My Fathers and I, is an escape into the past. It is told by a degenerate descendant of proud ancestors who were greatly absurd but greatly revered. The narrator is Edward G. (for Gratiano) Vanbrugh, a seedily broke antique dealer in a shabby English provincial town. His principal stock, symbolically enough, was a menagerie of Staffordshire China figures-shepherdesses, sailors, heroes of the past. As his narrative unfolds, it turns into a gallery of historical portraits redone by a modern caricaturist...
...Vanbrughs made fools of themselves in one way or another, but they did so in the grand manner. There was Eustace Vanbrugh (born 1834), a truly Victorian loony with an army of servants to command. (Linklater suggests that the servant class has disappeared only to re-emerge as civil servants taking revenge, in the name of socialism, on their former masters.) Eustace's lunacy revolved around the theological implications of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. He would bribe maidservants with a guinea in order to investigate whether or not they had tails: discovery of a vestigial caudal...
Most of the other Vanbrughs had their troubles with women, too. Francis Vanbrugh (born 1772) was a frail and handsome man given to fainting fits, who spent ten long years being hopelessly in love with the proud Duchess of Avalon. When she finally capitulated and came to his room, Francis, "maladroit as ever," took the occasion to die. Then there was Thomas Vanbrugh (born 1861), a captain in Prince Albert's Regiment of Assam Light Infantry in India, who gallantly disgraced himself during a native uprising when he ordered a retreat solely to save the local British Resident...
...modern Vanbrugh who tells the story, he is a nobody, but he has a spiv's eye for survival, the derisive eloquence of a shameless man and the bogus kind of face that, as he suggests, would go well on a butler or a bishop. As Author Linklater tells it in his savagely comic novel, Vanbrugh spent a profitable war as a wingless wing commander in the R.A.F. and ends his career as a superior flunky in the household of a Texas aristocrat. Says he: "I see my destiny, I recognize my genius ... but England, I have not abandoned...
...Sarah's grandeur reached perfection in the years that followed her fall from favor. "That B.B.B.B. old B.* the Duchess of Marlbh" (as the architect of Blenheim Palace, Sir John Vanbrugh, described her) outlived not only her husband, but Anne, Anne's successor (George I) and most of her own children. Widowed at 62, she rejected offers of marriage from an earl and from the proud Duke of Somerset. Marlborough had loved her passionately (tradition has it that on coming home from the wars, he would "pleasure" her even before he had taken off his boots), and Sarah...