Literary/Historical Question

I was re-reading on of CS Forester's Hornblower novels (The Happy Return) when I came across the following passage:

But Hornblower could give no vent to the flood of protest which was welling up within him. His cautious mind told him that a mad-man in a ship as small as the lugger must of necessity be chained to the deck, and his conscience reminded him uneasily of the torments he had seen el Supremo inflict without expostulation. This Spanish way of making a show out of insanity and greatness was repulsive cnough, but could be paralleled often enough in English history. One of the greatest writers of the English language, and a dignitary of the Church to boot, had once been shown in his dotage for a fee. There was only one line of argument which he could adopt.
'You are going to hang him, mad as he is?' he asked. *With no chance of making his peace with God?'
The Spaniard shrugged.
'Mad or sane, rebels must hang. Your Excellency must know that as well as I do.'

Who was this writer and 'dignatary of the Church' who comes to Hornblower's mind? I know that Jonathan Swift was a writer and clergyman, and that his mind went in old age, but I've never heard of him being 'shown in his dotage for a fee'. Was it someone else?

Oh dear...

One of the things which are capable of pulling me out of seclusion is an article such as this about the forthcoming Brideshead film. It makes for depressing reading. For example, the scriptwriter says:

"Although the book is set in the rarefied world of the aristocracy between the wars, it still speaks directly to many of the issues that count as 'current' - religious fundamentalism, class, sexual tolerance, the pursuit of individualism. For those reasons, I didn't feel I had to worry about the TV series and, as I wrote, I felt that more and more."

Religious fundamentalism in the novel Brideshead Revisited? I really can't understand what character's religious outlook could be so described.

Brideshead Redisovered?

Via the Telegraph:

The inspiration for Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is detailed in a new book showing how closely the author based his fictional characters on a family with whom he spent long periods in the 1930s.
It shows how the character of the flamboyant, teddy bear-owning aristocrat Sebastian Flyte was inspired by an Oxford contemporary with whom Waugh was infatuated and who, like his fictional counterpart, was a tortured alcoholic who died young.
Both 1981's acclaimed television adaptation of the novel, and a Hollywood film due out this year use Castle Howard, the extravagant North Yorkshire country pile, as the setting for Brideshead, the stately home of the Flyte family.
But the real inspiration, according to the work by Jane Mulvagh, was provided by Madresfield, a moated house in the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire.
For almost 1,000 years, the property has been the home of the Lygons, the family of the Earls Beauchamp. In her history of the building and its owners – Madresfield, The Real Brideshead – Mrs Mulvagh has spoken to the family, including some of those who knew Waugh, studied his letters to them and explored the property.

The article goes on to outline some of the similarities between the characters in Brideshead Revisited and the members of the Lygon family.

The Widow... Well worth a read...

Anyway, I've finished reading Seraphic's latest The Widow of Saint-Pierre, and enjoyed it thoroughly. The Widow is, of course, the relict of The Tragical Tale of Aelianus of England, but Seraphic brings on an engaging crew of new characters to populate the Island of Saint-Pierre. What's it about? Romance, opera, seaplanes and policemen. It's a touch more serious (in the good sense of the word) than her first novella (which you need not have read to enjoy this book), but that doesn't mean it's any less funny. If you enjoy Seraphic's insights and her prose, then you're going to enjoy this book. It's a rattling good tale.

What I'm reading at the moment...

... or spot the difference.

I just happened to lay the two novels I'm reading at the moment side-by-side, and was struck by a certain similarity. Well, first impressions tell me that despite the surreal edge to her work, Seraphic's Catholic Quasi-Canadians are an awful lot more normal than Flannery's Protestants of the Deep South.

But why am I promoting Seraphic's new book so assiduously? That's an easy question to answer.

Blackmail.

If she can't earn her crust writing, then Seraphic will be forced into a life of gold-digging and will allow her standards to slip to such an extent that she'll start dating Protestants and even seminarians!

Therefore, in order to save the souls of all involved, I'm shilling for Seraphic!

The Widow is...

... how you say, arrived?

To my American readers...

I understand that my bishop is visiting your country. (Please take good care of him.) That's why I'm going to leave the Pope-'blogging to you guys and will instead share this story of a hard-core Russian vodka-drinker:

A Russian man was struggling to remember a night of heavy drinking after waking to find a knife in his back.
Vodka drinker Yuri Lyalin, 53, was woken by his wife the next morning with not only a hangover but a six-inch blade between his shoulders.
Mr Lyalin managed to take a bus home, eat his breakfast and then fall into a deep sleep without realising he had been stabbed by his drinking partner.
It wasn't until his wife spotted the protruding handle and woke him, that an ambulance was called and he was taken to casualty.
Mr Lyalin, an electrician, had reportedly been drinking with a watchman at a factory in Vologda where he works.
It appears that the pair had an argument at some point before Mr Lyalin passed out.
The next morning when Mr Lyalin tried to resume his duties he was sent home for being inebriated.
None of his co-workers noticed the knife.
He then took a meandering course home, stopping to eat some sausage from his fridge before sleeping it off, according to Russian newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda and Gazeta.
His doctor, Victor Belov, said the knife "went into soft tissue and by pure luck did not touch any vital organs," Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
Mr Lyalin himself was philosophical about the incident.
"We got drunk together," he said. "Things happen when you drink."

Serabook
Oh, and Seraphic has published another book. I really enjoyed her first, but will wait a little while until I pretend to have read it before showering it with praise. ;)

Grave Matter
Both the Cranky Professor and Fr Tim Finigan visited one of my favourite places in Rome yesterday - the Campo Verano Cemetery.

Ain't Waugh Wonderful?

One of my favourite passages from his Helena:

When she heard mass in the Lateran Basilica -- as she often did in preference to her private chapel -- she went without ostentation and stood simply in the congregation. She was in Rome as a pilgrim and she was surrounded by friends. There was no way of telling them. There was nothing in their faces. A Thracian or a Teuton might stop a fellow countryman the streets, embrace him, and speak of home in his own language. Not so Helena and the Christians. The intimate family circle of which she was a member bore no mark of kinship. The barrow man grilling his garlic sausages in the gutter, the fuller behind his reeking public pots, the lawyer or the lawyer's clerk might each and all be one with the empress dowager in the Mystical Body. And the abounding heathen might in any hour become one of with them. There was no mob, only a vast multitude of souls, clothed in a vast variety of body, milling about in the Holy City, in the See of Peter.

Austen in the News

From the Times:

Mr Lassman, 43, had spent months trying without success to find a publisher for his own novel Freedom’s Temple. Out of frustration – and to test whether today’s publishers could spot great literature – he retyped the opening chapters of three Austen classics: Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
He changed only the titles, the names of the characters and his own name – calling himself Alison Laydee, after Austen’s early pseudonym “A Lady” – then waited for the offers to roll in.
Instead he received yet another sheaf of rejection letters, including one from Penguin, which republished Pride and Prejudice last year, describing his plagarised chapters as “a really original and interesting read” but not right for Penguin.
(snip)
Mr Lassman concocted his plan after returning from the Greek island where he had been writing his own novel and found himself facing a brick wall. “I was having a hard time getting it published and I was chatting to friends about it, saying I wondered how Jane would have fared today.
“Getting a novel accepted is very difficult unless you have an agent first, but I had no idea at the scale of rejection poor old Jane suffered.”
The literary agency Christopher Little, which represents J.K. Rowling, regretted that it was “not confident of placing this material with a publisher”. Jennifer Vale of Bloomsbury publishers turned down Northanger Abbey,renamed Susan, saying “I didn’t feel the book was suited to our list.”
The one publisher to recognise the deception was Alex Bowler, assistant editor at Jonathan Cape. His reply read: “Thank you for sending us the first two chapters of First Impressions; my first impression on reading these were ones of disbelief and mild annoyance, along with a moment’s laughter.
“I suggest you reach for your copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I’d guess lives in close proximity to your typewriter and make sure that your opening pages don’t too closely mimic the book’s opening. After all, there is such a thing as plagiarism and I’d hate for you to get in any kind of trouble with Jane Austen’s estate.”
Last night a spokeswoman for Penguin admitted that Mr Lassman’s submission may not actually have been read. She said: “We don’t take anything that is not agency-led, so I doubt the person would even have read it. I can’t comment on this individual case but I don’t think we have done anything bad.”

Rilke

A number of weeks ago, a very kind friend sent me this volume of Rilke's poetry which I am enjoying immensely. I've been meaning to post a couple of extracts and have finally got them transcribed:

Moses’s Death

None of the angels, but the dark and fallen one
was willing; took up arms and with deadly intent
approached the one to whom he had been sent.
But again he rattled away, backwards, and up
to the heavens he screamed: I can't.

For nonchalantly through the heavy brow
Moses had seen him coming and continued to write:
words of blessing and the everlasting name.
And his eye was pure to the depth of his core.

Thus, the Lord himself, carrying along half the heavens
came down and removed the covers of the hill like a bed;
placed the old man there. And from this well-ordered house,
he called the soul forth to rise, up! to recount
the many common things of a friendship deeply laid.

And in the end, the soul had enough, was satisfied,
and said this much. Then, the ancient God
bent toward the old man His old face and took
life with a kiss out of him into His own,
the older one. And with the hands of creation
He covered the mountain so as to disguise
it as one among many others
and to keep it from being recognized.


Extract From: Death of Mary

II
Who would have thought that until her coming
the entire heavens were incomplete?
The risen one had taken his seat,
but next to him, for twenty-four years,
the seat had been empty. And they had begun
to get used to the vacancy,
which seemed to have closed up and healed;
the son with his radiant gleaming had it filled

Thus, not even she who stepped into heaven
walked toward him, despite his pleas;
there was no room, only he was there
with the radiance that stung with its gleam.
But when she, the gentle figure,
sought to blend with other newcomers there
and sidled with them inconspicuously,
there broke from her such sheen
of such might, that the angel next to her
blinded by it, cried: Who is she?
There was surprise. Then they saw
how the Father in heaven implored our Lord
so that caressed by a mild dawn
the empty spot emerged like a small wound,
like a trace of loneliness,
like something he still endured,
a residue of earthly time, a dry compress-.

And they looked at her; and she, afraid,
leaned forward as if to say: I am
his most enduring pain-: and fell suddenly
forward. But the angels caught her and braced
her fall and happily, for the final stretch,
carried her in.

I wish my German was sufficent to properly appreciate the original poetry.

Another Jane Austen Story

From the Telegraph:

A picture claimed to be the only oil portrait of Jane Austen is to be sold in America because opposition from the National Portrait Gallery which refuses to support its authenticity makes it harder to sell in this country.
Henry Rice, the owner of the disputed portrait and a sixth generation descendant of England's favourite woman novelist, said yesterday that it was "a scandal" that the picture would be lost to Britain. He also said that he was fed up with "effectively being called a liar" by those who questioned the painting's origins.
The portrait purportedly shows Austen at the age of 13 or 14 in 1788 or 1789, looking a little chubby with a joke playing about her lips in a flowing white dress and holding a green parasol. It is thought to have been painted by the British society painter Ozias Humphrey who has placed his subject walking in fields near her family home in Hampshire.
(snip)
The portrait, measuring 5ft by 3ft, passed down to Mr Rice through generations of the family Jane Austen's brother, Edward. It only came to prominence in 1884 when it featured as the frontispiece of the first published collection of Austen's letters and for 60 years after, it was accepted as the most important image of the novelist.
The National Portrait Gallery attempted to buy it from Mr Rice's father in the 1930s but then in 1948 came a bombshell when Dr R W Chapman, a prominent Austen scholar, dated the dress in the picture to 1805 when Jane would have been aged 30. It was also suggested that Jane's father, an impoverished country vicar, could not have afforded such fine clothes for his third child and that it was possibly a portrait on Jane's distant cousin, Jane Motley Austen.
Since, experts' opinions have raged back and forthand on five occasions, Mr Rice offered to sell the picture to the NPG but the gallery declined.
In 1998, Jacob Simon, a curator at the NPG, revealed that during a restoration, the lining of the picture had been removed and revealed a tax stamp paid by the canvas supplier - "Wm Legg, High Holborn, London". Mr Simon said that Legg was recorded as working in Holborn for only four years from 1802, which would put Jane in her late twenties, not at all like the young girl in the portrait.
Mr Rice claimed yesterday that fresh research in the last 10 years - notably by Professor Claudia Johnson of Princeton University and Brian Southam, chairman of the Jane Austen Society - backed his claims that the portrait was genuine. He said that the date of the tax stamp was "not reliable"and that it had been found that Jane had a cousin at the court of Marie Antoinette in France who sent fashionable cloth to the Austen family for dresses.
Mr Rice said: "This picture has never left out family and has always been a portrait of Jane. Effectively we have been called liars.

The horror!

From the Times:

Having been depicted as a romantic heroine in the film Becoming Jane, Britain’s best-loved author has been given a makeover by a publisher.
According to Wordsworth Editions, which sells millions of cut-price classic novels, the only authentic portrait of Jane Austen is too unattractive.
Helen Trayler, its managing director, said: “The poor old thing didn’t have anything going for her in the way of looks. Her original portrait is very, very dowdy. It wouldn’t be appealing to readers, so I took it upon myself to commission a new picture of her.
“We’ve given her a bit of a makeover, with make-up and some hair extensions and removed her nightcap. Now she looks great — as if she’s just walked out of a salon.”
[Dixit Zadok: The mind boggles.]
The only contemporary portrait of Austen is a sour-faced sketch by her sister Cassandra that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. But the author’s friends and family described her as “very attractive” and “like a doll”, and a niece, Anna, said that Cassandra’s depiction of Jane was “hideously unlike” her.
A Victorian engraving made from that picture formed the basis for the new watercolour, which will appear on the cover of a “deluxe” collection of her works, to appear in September.
Where aesthetics allow, the publisher prefers to use an image of the author on the front cover. Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde all made the grade, but other literary titans may now be in line for airbrushing.
Ms Trayler said: “Virginia Woolf wasn’t much of a looker. I’m also considering making over George Eliot, who was frumpy, and William Wordsworth, who was pretty hideous. Most poets were really unattractive, with the one exception being Tennyson, who has wonderful bone structure.”
(snip)
Patrick Janson-Smith, a leading literary agent, said: “Portraits of modern authors are airbrushed the whole time, especially American lady authors of a certain age. It’s a shock to meet a writer when the reality falls a little short. We live in a shallow world where authors are increasingly sold on their appearance.”

Curiously, of the Austen siblings, Jane is the only one for whom there is no surviving professional portrait.
And also from the Times:

TV is to turn Pride and Prejudice into a time-travel saga. The broadcaster wants to emulate the success of the BBC One series Life on Mars, in which a detective is catapulted back in time, and build on the triumph of a run of Jane Austen adaptations, featuring stars such as Billie Piper.
In Lost in Austen, Amanda, a chardonnay-swigging West London girl, discovers a bonnet-wearing woman in her bathroom who introduces herself as Elizabeth Bennet. Through a series of accidents, Amanda is transported to Regency England, where she melts before Mr Darcy’s brooding glare. Miss Bennet, meanwhile, breathes life into the modern girl’s useless boyfriend.

Ye cannot halve the Gospel of God's grace

This is a fascinating poem of John Henry Newman with the most un-poetic title 'Liberalism'.. As an Anglican he travelled to Italy and whilst there fell seriously ill. His recovery lead him to the conclusion that he was spared by Divine Providence for some mission back in England. He believed that he had a role to fight against Liberalism (or the 'Anti-Dogmatic' principle) in the Church of England.
On his return home, he wrote the following verses in Palermo:

Ye cannot halve the Gospel of God's grace;
Men of presumptuous heart! I know you well.
Ye are of those who plan that we should dwell,
Each in his tranquil home and holy place;
Seeing the Word refines all natures rude,
And tames the stirrings of the multitude.

And ye have caught some echoes of its lore,
As heralded amid the joyous choirs;
Ye mark'd it spoke of peace, chastised desires,
Good-will and mercy,—and ye heard no more;
But, as for zeal and quick-eyed sanctity,
And the dread depths of grace, ye pass'd them by.

And so ye halve the Truth; for ye in heart,
At best, are doubters whether it be true,
The theme discarding, as unmeet for you,
Statesmen or Sages. O new-compass'd art
Of the ancient Foe!—but what, if it extends
O'er our own camp, and rules amid our friends?

Boy Bishop!

Westminster Cathedral has revived the tradition of the Boy Bishop - read about it at Solomon, I Have Surpassed Thee.

Don Camillo

Julie at Happy Catholic shares with us some of the wonderful Don Camillo stories.