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A ‘slobbering valentine to a member of the upper classes’, ‘an orgy of snobbery’, and ‘the apotheosis of brown-nosing’: Angela Carter’s excoriating dismissal of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), delivered in Tom Paulin’s notorious televisual polemic, J’accuse Virginia Woolf (1991), serves as a reminder that this work has as much potential as any of her novels to provoke heated disagreements. That it should be so might seem surprising, as it is one of the most easy-going of her novels, one in which she consciously simplified her prose style in the interests of drawing in the reader effortlessly; it is also the most comic of her novels, mocking the conventions of history and biography. That Carter in particular should be so violently opposed to the novel is particularly surprising, as its willingness to rewrite conventional fictional forms anticipates her novels, and its employment of fantastic elements anticipates the ‘magic realist’ mode that she was to employ. Like Orlando, Carter’s own The Passion of New Eve (1977) also centres on a change of sex, albeit more violently wrought. Mostly intriguingly of all, in 1979 Glyndebourne Opera House commissioned Carter to write a libretto for an opera, never completed, of Woolf’s novel. Carter’s dismissal of Woolf might appear to stem from unease about working in her shadow.

To leave it there would neglect the prominence of social class in Carter’s opinion. Though the fragments of her libretto were published under the title Orlando: or, The Enigma of the Sexes, another working title was Orlando: An English Country House Opera; the country house and the aristocracy are significant factors in Orlando. Woolf’s novel was inspired by her passionate relationship with Vita Sackville-West in 1925 and 1926. Vita had been brought up at Knole in Kent, her family’s ancestral seat since the early seventeenth century; she loved the house and its history, but as a woman, she did not stand to inherit it. Vita’s family history made a strong impression on Woolf: ‘All these ancestors & centuries, & silver & gold, have bred a perfect body’, she wrote in 1924, with a hint of critical awareness of Vita’s privilege; in the same diary entry she noted how Knole could house all the poor of Judd Street, then one of the slum areas of Bloomsbury. In 1927 she was more overawed, more deeply in love, and less critical: walking round Knole with Vita, ‘All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb & forgotten; but a crowd of people stood behind, not dead at all; not remarkable; fair faced, long limbed; affable; & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily.’ Politically Woolf was liberal, progressive, and above all anti-authoritarian; by the 1930s she was actively involved in her local Labour Party. Visiting Knole in 1927, however, she seems to have been enchanted by a conservative ideology in which the country house serves as symbol of continuity between generations, of the centrality of monarchy to the British constitution, and of a benign relation between the aristocracy and the people. It is ‘ideological’ in the sense of masking and normalizing exploitative economic relations.

The strength of Carter’s hostility in 1991 may well have something to do with the revival of the country house ideology in British mass culture in the 1980s. ITV’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in the depths of the economic recession of the early 1980s, was a particularly pointed example. Critical works such as Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985) and Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987) highlighted the ways in which ‘heritage’ serves political ends. However, Carter’s remarks don’t tell the whole truth, no matter how much they resonated in their moment. Important though the country house is to Orlando, it is less important than poetry and the hero/heroine’s dogged pursuit of the muse, and poetry in turn is less important than the question of personal identity. House-building and poetry-writing stand in direct contrast to each other. In Chapter II, it is the scorn of the poet Nick Greene that makes Orlando turn to the refurbishment of his house; though when the work is complete he holds banquets there, when the banquets are at their height he retreats to his private room to enjoy the pleasures of poetry. When Orlando travels to Turkey, his/her English values are put into perspective. To the Turkish gipsies, a family lineage four or five hundred years is of negligible duration, and the desire to own a house with hundreds of bedrooms is vulgar. Viewed from a certain angle, the established aristocrat becomes a vulgar upstart. Although the house still matters to Orlando when she returns to it triumphantly in the final chapter, and although the house still holds vivid memories of the people she has known, the cause of the triumph is the recognition of Orlando’s writing; and she recalls the sceptical perspective of the gipsies.

Focusing on the relationship between Vita and Virginia, Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson described Orlando as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’, a phrase that was Carter’s starting point. If Carter’s estimate is distorted by the demands of her time, Nicolson’s isn’t quite right either: Orlando is more than a purely personal document. It raises questions about personal identity and national identity, about history and its transmission, and about the value of writing, and it does so in a way that persistently mocks established values.

Headline image: Knole House, owned by the National Trust (2009). In the early 17th century the Sackville family re-modelled the old archbishops’ palace into a stately home. Photo by John Wilder. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the country house appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Back to Brideshead Revisited, for it is important not to leave that book behind before celebrating a few more aspects of its differentiating greatness. I mentioned structure in yesterday's blog, and I should have been more clear, I should have said: Isn't it extraordinary how Waugh is able to shift his camera's lens from character to character, giving us all we need to know about each one, precisely when we need to know it? Waugh unveils relationships, and this trumps any adherence to strict chronology. It is by shuffling his time deck that he gains much of his power, so that by the time we begin Book II and we are told, "My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time," we already fully understand that we are not just reading a masterfully assembled story. We are being steeped in something much deeper.

That's one thing. But there is also, of course, the peeling away that Waugh does, his sui generis descriptions of people, his way of showing the magnitude and mystery of time passing. Take this passage, about his heroine, Julia, whom Waugh's narrator knew as a 20 year old, and whom he rediscovers several years later:

She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spiderly look; the head that I used to think Quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine—not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.

One last thing, just for today: Waugh's mastery of nuance. Not just the nuance of telling one story overtly while suggesting another (the told story of one aborted love affair, the never quite told story of a suppressed one). But Waugh's ability to pin a concept to the wall. Here he is on charm:

"... Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."

Brideshead Revisited is a classic, as my niece Claire would say. An electrification, on so many levels. An instruction.

 
       
Anthony Andrews as Lord Sebastian Flyte, Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, and Aloysius

 I'm simply over the moon that you could join me today, the last Poetry Friday of the July-August Teddy Bear and Friends Picnic. It's the perfect time to salute Aloysius, the bear who appeared in the 1981 BBC television series, Brideshead Revisited, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh.

As I mentioned in this post, seeing Aloysius prompted me to start collecting bears. I think it was the first time I realized that many adults still have their childhood teddies, and it's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of!

Waugh based Aloysius on Archibald Ormsby-Gore (Archie), the real-life bear of poet, writer, and broadcaster, Sir John Betjeman, a friend at Oxford. Betjeman (tutored by C.S. Lewis), took Archie along to Oxford in the 1920's, and died with him in his arms in 1984. 

Archie has been described as being decidedly Protestant or Baptist, with strict moral codes, opposed to drinking and smoking. It's a good thing somebear was of a responsible ilk, since Betjeman, apparently, was somewhat of a bounder.

The bear used in the series belonged to famous British teddy bear enthusiast and actor, Peter Bull, who initially named him Delicatessen. Seems Delicatessen spent his first 50 years on a grocery store shelf in Maine before its owner sent him to Bull for safekeeping. So the famous bear who starred in this very British series was an American, a 1907 Ideal Novelty & Toy Co. bear, to be precise, who changed his name to Aloysius, garnered international fame, and now resides in a museum near Oxford.

All this talk of England makes me want to watch the series, one of my all-time favorites, once again. I remember visiting Oxford in the late 70's; the dreamy spires were magnificent, and just breathing the air made me feel smarter. In the world of Brideshead Revisited, the idle rich seem unhappily thwarted by Catholic guilt, and there is Aloysius, a symbol of Lord Sebastian Flyte's refusal to grow up.

In the opening scene, Sebastian invites Charles Ryder to lunch in his rooms at Christ Church College (YouTube version here). There is lots of champagne, plover eggs in a mossy nest, and lobster thermidor. At one point, one of Sebastian's guests, Anthony Blanche, recites from T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land (thought to be shocking at the time) through a megaphone. This is based on a true incident enacted by future art critic Harold Acton, who wished to "excite rage in the hearts of Philistines."

Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

*Fans self*

Today, let's celebrate innocence in the midst of decadence. Just for you, I'm pulling out all the stops -- lobster rolls, champagne, and John Betjeman's poem about his beloved Archie. 

   
     Here's to poetry, friends, good health and good writing!


  
      Doesn't this look scrumptious? Great recipe here.

Nothing left to do now, but close your eyes and think of England. Pip pip!

(Sorry, my plover wouldn't lay for me.)

ARCHIBALD
by John Betjeman

The bear that sits above my bed
A doleful bear he is to see;
From out his drooping pear-shaped head
His woollen eyes look into me.
He has no mouth, but seems to say:
'They'll burn you on the Judgement Day.'

Those woollen eyes, the things they've seen
Those flannel ears, the things they've heard --
Among horse-chestnut fans of green,
The fluting of an April bird,
And quarrelling downstairs until
Doors slammed at Thirty One West Hill.

(Rest is here, scroll down for poem.)

        
 Let's hear it for teddies!!        

Bearly believable Poetry Friday Roundup can be found at Big A little a.

**Bonus video: Sebastian and Charles here, with great shots of Aloysius. How wonderful to drift down the river with a picnic lunch and champagne!

Lobster Roll photo posted in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.