Mad World

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Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, Paula Byrne

In early 1944  Evelyn Waugh applied to his commanding officer for three months leave of absence from the army to write a book.  He gave various reasons for why the army wouldn’t miss him, including the disarming admission that he was unsuited for a desk job as he was no good at admin, he was also honest enough to admit that the book would be no use whatsoever for propaganda purposes.  Eventually he got his way and Waugh retired to Devon to explore the idea that was obsessing him – the idea that became Brideshead Revisited.

Paula Byrne’s fascinating book is about Waugh and the Lygon family who were the inspiration for the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited.  The Lygons were from the very top echelons of the English aristocracy, their father Earl Beauchamp was a good looking bon-viveur, charming, fabulously rich and one of the most important men in the Liberal party, they were brought up in Madresfield Court, a huge rambling house in Worcestershire, there were seven children, three of whom became close friends (and a lover in one case) Waugh’s, Hugh the second son, feckless, not very bright but utterly charming and loved by all;

Hugh Lygon, principal inspiration for Sebastian Flyte.

Lady Mary – known as Maimie, the most beautiful of the sisters,

Julia Flyte was a composite character but had a lot of Maimie Lygon in her.

and the youngest daughter Lady Dorothy, usually called Coote, who was the model for Cordelia. The Lygon’s should have led untroubled, gilded lives of luxurious ease yet the family was ripped apart by one of the biggst scandals that had ever hit the English aristocracy, something that was made even more bitter by it being Lord Beauchamp’s brother in law, the Duke of Westminster,  who orchestrated his downfall.

Mad World works magnificently on two levels, firstly it’s an absolutely riveting story of the times and the people.  Paula Byrne is very good at describing the anger that Evelyn Waugh’s generation felt towards that of the previous one for allowing and fighting in the first world war and how much it separated them from what went on before. The Lygon’s were hardly your usual stuffy, hunting, shooting, fishing members of the aristocracy either, the girls behaved with a surprising freedom, one, Lady Sibell, was the mistress of Lord Beaverbrook for many years and Maimie, the most beautiful of the sisters, had a series of lovers.  Hardly the demure, heavily chaperoned debutantes that were supposed to epitomise well brought up girls of the 20’s and 30’s.

Secondly Mad World satisfies the inner geek of people like me who love finding out background information about favourite books.

Diana Quick (Julia) and Anthony Andrews (Sebastian) bore a remarkable resemblance to their real-life inspirations in the 1981 TV adaptation, Evelyn Waugh, who based Charles Ryder on himself, looked nothing like Jeremy Irons.

It’s particularly rich pickings for the literary geek in fact as Evelyn Waugh wove his stories around events in his own life, people he knew and places he’d been too.  Madresfield Court appeared in one of his earlier books, Brideshead is modeled on Castle Howard – just like the TV series, though the chapel at Brideshead is an exact description of the real one at Madresfield down to the angels wearing arts and crafts printed cotton smocks.

Waugh was no straightforward reporter though, his genius lay in the way he could take two or three people he knew and twine them together to make something different with his or her own voice.  And he wrote dialogue beautifully, was a consummate writer of prose and was very funny too – in short he was a superb writer…

The final reason why I enjoyed this book so much is a very personal one because it re-established Waugh as a reasonably decent human being for me.  About fifteen years ago I read Selina Hastings’ biography of Waugh which presented him as such a deeply unpleasant person that it put me off reading his books.  I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its author’s personality but sometimes it’s hard not to be coloured by it. Paula Byrne’s Waugh is far from faultless but he’s human and a very good friend, when Maimie Lygon fell on hard times in the 5O’s Waugh sent her substantial sums of money and no-one who had so many people who were very fond of can be all bad.  So I can start re-reading Waugh with unalloyed delight.   I’m off to England today and I know what books I’m looking out for.

Re-reading waugh after fifteen years, it’s going to be such a pleasure.

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The Dordogne in Winter

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Chateaux, Dordogne, Lascaux

The OH and I clocked up 30 years together this week – it honestly doesn’t seem that long but since our eldest daughter is 29 it seems we got the maths right – so we thought we’d go away for the night to celebrate.  But it’s November and the only places which are nice and warm are a long way away, and most of the places within easy reach have closed for the winter.  Now I understand why summer weddings are so popular, forget the romantic day in a flower strewn meadow or whatever, you’ve got years of a decent choice of anniversary trips lying ahead of you.

Chosing somewhere to go was further complicated by the OH’s response of ‘Been there,’ to just about everywhere I suggested.  He did spend a couple of days looking up châteaux hotels but they were either closed – of course – or didn’t bother to reply to our emails about room availability.  Obviously they were too grand to worry about filling rooms in the off season, I think we’ll stick with the more modest places in future, they’re really pleased to have your custom.  Eventually we found what looked like a fabulous little place in Souillac, near Sarlat in the Dordogne and booked it with a sigh of relief.  Despite living next to the Dordogne  for 19 years I’ve never done a proper road trip there, well it’s close isn’t it?  There’s always going to be time to go sometime in the future…  hence the reason I’ve been to more sites in Provence than Perigord.

As we half knew already the Dordogne is shut in the winter, we didn’t realise quite how much though.  Once you get past Lalinde all the little towns which must bustle in the summer are empty, restaurants and hotels closed, tourist sites boarded up, they’d even closed the whole of La Roque Gajeac – literally, the road was closed in the middle of town and there was no way through.  Any threat of looming grumpiness was allayed by the sheer beauty around us, gold and red autumnal trees all over the hills, pretty (deserted) medieval villages and seemingly a castle on the top of nearly every hill;

Chateau de Beynac, above, and below, Chateau de Castlenaud, almost directly opposite on the other side of the Dordogne:

The hotel in Souillac, the Pavillion St Martin, was a complete success.  It’s in the old part of town, had really comfortable beds, a staircase I’d give my eye teeth for:

the bannisters were oak, black with age, wonderfully tactile and we got strawberries for breakfast.  What more could you ask for?  But – if the Dordogne is a bit lifeless in winter, Souillac is completely moribund.  All the restaurants were closed – the one that does stay open has it’s night off on Tuesdays, so we had our romantic 30th anniversary dinner in a pizza restaurant.  Not the sort of pizza place where they have candles in Chianti bottle and tablecloths, the sort where you have youths in baseball caps and rucksacks lining up for their take-aways.  The pizzas made up for it – a bit anyway – they were really good.

The hotel had a handy guide to what stays open year round and much to my relief Lascaux, or rather Lascaux II does.  A friend said when I said I was planning to go there, ‘Don’t you know it’s fake?’  The original caves were closed to the public because the condensation from the breath of up to 1200 visitors a day was causing huge damage to the paintings and tourists are now allowed into a replica of two of the most famous caves.   Why not go to the current exhibition in Bordeaux about Lascaux instead?’ my friend went on.

All I can say is Bah, humbug! to the scoffers who don’t want to see a facsimile.  Lascaux II is by any standards stunning.  There’s no other word for it unless you care to search the thesaurus.  I’m sure the Bordeaux exhibition is fascinating and the pictures excellent but what makes Lascaux so breath-taking is that it’s three-dimensional.  Two of the most important caves have been reproduced exactly, down to chips in the rock, they’re surprisingly small, not a little claustrophobic, and these fabulous cave paintings are around you, flowing over the rock, the outlines of the animals shaped by the contours of the stone they’re painted on.  We weren’t allowed to take photographs, but that didn’t matter, nothing flat and two dimensional can reproduce the effect those rock paintings had.

It was exactly the right time of year to go, there were only nine of us in our group but that was quite enough, at one point the rock narrows so much two people would have difficulty getting through side by side, and the second cave was barely big enough for our little group.

The guide described the caves as the Sistine Chapel of the prehistoric world.  I’m inclined to agree with him but Lascaux had a far greater impact on me than the Sistine Chapel did.  The Sistine Chapel was wonderful, awe-inspiring, but all the pictures I’d seen before slightly blunted its effect, as I’ve said (at length) photographs of Lascaux are just a pale taster of the real thing.

 

Something Stupid

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Kindle, Something Stupid

I’m thrilled to say that Something Stupid is at last out as an e-book with this gorgeous new cover by Theo Wayte.

I say at last because I’d inadvertently signed myself up twice to Kindle using two different email addresses, my personal one which I buy things on and my writing one which I don’t.  It caused a considerable amount of confusion in Amazon’s computer brain which couldn’t work out why two different people called Victoria Corby were both claiming worldwide publication rights to the same book.  Of course computers can’t get their circuits round the idea that human beings make mistakes so each time I tried to publish the book it would get bounced back after twenty-four hours because there was a query over who did hold the publication rights.

You may well ask why I didn’t simply delete one of my identities.  Simple.  Because I couldn’t.  Just like Hotel California, ‘You can check out any time you like but you can never leave…’

Fortunately, unlike Hotel California, a heartfelt plea to the Help desk that all of this was doing my head in worked and my final attempt at getting Something Stupid on linewas successful.  However, as far as Kindle’s concerned there are still two Victoria Corby’s who write books with the same title.  I wonder what will happen when I try to publish Seven Week Itch.

Look what we found in the pool…

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salamanders

The OH was doing the last clean out of the pool yesterday and fished out what he thought was a dead un.  Then this handsome little chap started moving.

We’ve never seen a live salamander before, but one thing I did know is that these ones are poisonous to cats and dogs.  Since Kevin has already had a bad case of lizard tummy (he’s so greedy that I think he’d eat a worm given the chance), my daughter took the salamander well away and put him on a vine post to warm up in the sun.

Fortunately she then looked up salamanders on the net and discovered that they aren’t lizards, they’re amphibians and some of them are newts.  Or rather newts are salamanders.  Quite opposite to what you might think and what legend would have you believe, most salamanders don’t like the heat.  She was in effect frying the poor thing’s brains by warming it up.  So the salamander was removed to the edge of the spring in the woods where it’s cool and humid as they like it.  We trust that he salamandered happily off.