Carpenter The Brideshead Generation

Evelyn Waugh and His Friends
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30928-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 550 Seiten

'[The Brideshead Generation] has both style and substance, and is above all an enjoyable companion. It has a wildly amusing cast, here controlled by a skilful director.' Evening Standard 'Jovial and entertaining, full of the sort of stories that your friends will tell you if you don't read it before them.' Independent 'Carpenter has read widely and has collected an enormous fund of entertaining stories and facts.' Sunday Telegraph 'Hauntingly sad and wonderfully funny and by far the best thing Humphrey Carpenter has done.' Fiona MacCarthy, The Times

Humphrey Carpenter was born and educated in Oxford, and attended the Dragon School and Keble College. He was a well-known biographer and children's writer, and worked previously as a producer at the BBC. He wrote biographies of J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ezra Pound, C. S. Lewis and Dennis Potter. Among his many books for children were the best-selling Mr Majeika series. He also wrote several plays for the theatre and radio. A keen musician, he was a member of a 1930s-style jazz band, Vile Bodies, which was resident at the Ritz Hotel in London for a number of years. He died in 2005.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carpenter, Humphrey

Leseproben

1

‘… Thought They Must Be Foreigners’

When the First World War came to an end in November 1918, Eton College still seemed firmly rooted in the Edwardian era. Reports on the Wall Game dominated the Eton Chronicle, and when a series of Eton Broadsheets was begun, to print the work of school poets, such subjects were chosen as ‘Derwentwater’ and ‘The East Window of Eton College Chapel’. Yet Eton, secure at the top of the English social system, could afford to tolerate eccentricity in a way that lesser establishments did not dare. As George Orwell, who was a scholar there from 1917 to 1921, has written, ‘Eton … has one great virtue … a tolerant and civilized atmosphere which gives each boy a fair chance of developing his own individuality.’

Certainly in odd corners of the school, unconventional tastes could be encountered. At Dyson’s the jewellers in Eton High Street there was a wind-up gramophone in a room above the shop, and for a few pence Etonians could go up the stairs and play their own records – such machines being forbidden within the confines of the school itself. In the winter months of 1918, customers in the shop might, on certain afternoons, have had reason to glance up at the ceiling, for upstairs an entire corps de ballet seemed to be practising its steps.

If anyone ventured up and pushed open the door, he or she would see just a couple of young Etonians. But they were leaping around the room with the energy, if not the finesse, of Nijinsky. It was the music of the Ballets Russes to which they were dancing: Petroushka, and then, with a pause to wind the machine, a side or two of Schéhérazade.

Neither of them had yet seen the celebrated ballet company, but one of the boys – the one with a high domed forehead – had met Diaghilev when the impresario came to tea at the boy’s family’s Florentine villa. They had both avidly followed reports of the company’s public appearances, cutting out pictures of Massine and other principals from the illustrated papers, and making inspired guesses about the choreography.

After a few minutes, they would pause for breath, and the other boy – tall, with jet-black wavy hair and a dead-white face – would expatiate on his latest enthusiasm, in a manner copied at fourth hand from the now dispersed followers of Oscar Wilde. It might have been absurdly precocious in a thirteen-year-old, were it not that he seemed to have been born for such a performance. His eyes, as Eton acquaintances remarked, seemed by nature to be heavily made up.

‘My dear, I’ve just discovered a person who has something, just something, a little bit unusual, under a pimply and rather catastrophic exterior. Of course, I may be mistaken, and there is a faint risk that he may develop into a bore. But what do you think, my dear, he has a passion for campanology.’

‘Really, Brian?’ responds the other. ‘And is that interesting?’

‘Why, it is the art of ringing bells, my dear. He knows everything, simply everything there is to know about it. I’m trying to persuade him to write a causerie on the subject. It could be extremely suggestive. I think I shall send it with a covering letter to the Eton Chronicle,explaining to the editor why I think it so very important.’

He pauses and blinks his long eyelashes. He usually tells new acquaintances: ‘I am said to be the image of Max Beerbohm when he was beautiful as well as brilliant,’ and he does indeed bear a close resemblance to the Rothenstein drawing of the young Max.

His companion, whose vowels do not sound altogether English – a lengthened a here, an American twang there – asks why campanology should be so important.

‘It struck me’, answers the Beerbohm cherub, ‘that every house’ (he means every boarding house in Eton College) ‘should build its own belfry. Then it could be distinguished both musically and architecturally. But I’m afraid’, he adds with a sigh, ‘that in my case m’tutor is bound to choose Lutyens. I suppose it can’t be helped, though one hears that he has made some tolerable designs for New Delhi. You, of course, will want to erect a Florentine campanile.’ The cherub pouts thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Having originated the scheme, I shall insist on being Chairman of the Bell Committee. I shall choose m’tutor’s bells.’

His companion laughs. ‘At Cartier’s, I suppose? And of platinum inlaid with cabochon rubies?’

The cherub frowns. ‘Now, don’t be facetious, dear, it doesn’t happen to suit you. I am in earnest. Just think of the carillons, my dear! I shall commission Rimsky-Korsakov!’

‘But he’s with the angels, Brian.’

‘Will you stop interrupting? I can see that you’re getting into one of your mosquito moods. Of course Rimsky’s dead, we all know that. I meant … Granados. It would be nice to have a Malaguena or a Seguedilla to soothe one at lock-up time. Such memories of Spain!’ The cherub has never been out of England in his life. ‘Memories of bullfights, and matadors with enormous shoulders and no hips – I can’t think why hips were invented – and sunlit patios with Moorish fountains ….’ He sighs again. ‘I can see an endless argument about it with m’tutor, even though he is a trifle more cultivated than the average beak. He’s bound to plump for Elgar or Vaughan Williams. And when the belfries are completed, there are bound to be bats, symbolically speaking….’

This time it is his companion who sighs, slightly impatiently. He points out that the half-hour for which they have paid for the gramophone will soon run out, and he wants to buy something for tea before evening school begins.

The mention of food sets off an argument – the cherub and his friend are always disputing about it. Though the friend looks entirely English, he has lived in Italy for most of his life. His parents own one of the great Florentine villas, and he frequently preaches to the cherub the delights of ravioli al sugo, sanguinaccio, panini stuffed with white truffles (he has them sent regularly to Eton in jars), and the thousand varieties of pizza, as it is served in Naples, where his family has ancestral connections. After such a diet, he frequently explains, it is tantamount to torture to be ordered by one’s fagmaster to fry up British sausages in malodorous lard. And he still has terrible memories of preparatory school food – ‘hairy brawn … knobbly porridge … blotched oily margarine …’.

The cherub remains unmoved by such speeches. The only gastronomic delight which moves him is marrons glacés, and he and his friend now fall to arguing the virtues of their favourite varieties, Doney’s in Florence versus Rumpelmeyer’s in London. ‘Doney’s’, says the friend passionately, ‘are of classical proportions, neither too large nor too small, neither too brittle nor too compact. They just open their luscious chapped lips and let their somnolent juices ooze within you. And the frosting of sugar melts gently down your throat, warming the red corpuscles so that they play gay tarantellas while you masticate – and even for some time afterwards!’

The cherub is impressed by this speech. ‘Perhaps, since you are more eloquent on this subject than on others of greater import, there may be something in what you say.’

Descending to reality for a moment, he offers his companion a paper bag containing acid drops; for even Etonians do not have endless supplies of marrons glacés. Then suddenly he leaps across the room. ‘My dear! I’ll offer you a very special marron!’ And, winding the handle of the apparatus, he selects another record from his box.

‘What now, Brian?’ asks the friend.

‘Hush. Be patient and listen. Now: it’s coming, it’s coming.’

It is a man’s voice, sinister and caressing, in some sort of foreign accent, not clearly audible, for the record is heavily scratched: ‘Svengali will go to London himself, and play as nobody else can play; and hundreds of beautiful English women will see and hear and go mad with love for him. They will invite him to their palaces, and bring him tea, and gin, and marrons glacés….’

‘Isn’t it divine!’ croons the cherub. ‘Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Svengali. I feel I’m eating a marron glacé every time he pronounces it. My dear, whenever we have a craving for them, we shall come here to Dyson’s and simple feast off the record.’

And so, packing up their records and the acid drops, the two descend the stairs and slip out through the shop into the November gloom of Eton High Street; the cherub’s companion reflecting, not for the first time, that for all his Italian upbringing, all his contacts with the rich and eccentric, all his meetings with geniuses and connoisseurs, he has never before encountered such an exotic, disarming and stimulating creature as the thirteen-year-old Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard.

*

The friend himself, Harold Acton, could scarcely be described as a conventional Etonian. Though...