What a fantastic piece. You will be thrilled?/distraught? to hear that I saw the play in the West End with D Day Lewis as Guy Bennett *and that we went to the stage door afterwards and told him we thought he was 'awfully good' and he said 'thanks'.*
But there was also a kind of sexualisation or fetishization of class in the ether at that time - cf Tatler, and an obsession with glittering balls (dance ones) and brittle decadence. And at the very top, Brideshead Revisited, featuring both sexy upper classes and sexy near-sex between beautiful boys, and with which the whole culture seemed to be obsessed in 1981-2. My entire girls' school form was *agog* at that one, and at least two or three trailed around with their own Aloysius bears.
I love this. I am so glad you guys are reviewing all these things from my adolescence and young adulthood. It is wonderful to be given an opportunity to reconsider what I thought then, what moved me then, how I felt, and compare it to now.
For example, the first time I read The Razor's Edge, I was 19. I read it again when I was 40 something and it went from being my most favorite book to being a nostalgic memory of how romantic I had been about my life and future, and a reminder of how much I had changed and what dreams had to be dropped if I were to move forward.
I saw the movie again around that time and found I did not like it as well as I did the first time.
Another Country, though, I always found very sad. The longing and pain of being dumped into a place where children were supposed to be made into whatever the God and Country needed them to be, and damn who they really were. So barbaric, that part of Britishness. Sorry. :(
Is there a Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons review anywhere in here...? I will have to go look
Thanks Whitney. I haven't read The Razor's Edge (actually have never read any Maugham at all which is a bit rubbish of me) but yes, it's quite powerful how these cultural artefacts unlock older versions of yourself and give you a sort of lens to view your various selves with. All very self-obsessed obviously but sometimes there are wider themes hiding in there too.
Boarding schools are a total mystery to me. My bro didn't board, my mother would never have gone for that - she'd worked as a researcher on a review of public schools set up by the Labour government in the '60s, and her job had been to read the diaries of young boys sent away to board at around the age of 8 (!!!). She said their first few months of diary entries were full of despair and loneliness and homesickness, but that if you took the same boy and looked at his diary entries from several years later you would find no trace of the previous sadness, and that in follow-up interviews where the diary entries were read to the boys they flatly denied that they could ever have written them and thought there must have been misattribution or mistakes because they'd always loved boarding. Really scary stuff. (As I understand it the diaries were written specifically for the research project and the boys knew other people would be reading them - just read this back and realised it sounded creepy!)
We haven't done Brideshead yet but we did rewatch it recently and I read the book (for the first time) - the book is absolutely brilliant, Waugh really could write (I know how ridiculous that sounds but I was really taken aback by how beautiful the writing was). We're thinking about what we might do with it...
My all-time favorite Waugh work is The Loved One. I laughed so hard, I cried when I read that, but of course, that was in 1989 or thereabouts. It's probably time I revisit that one, too. But, yes, I do recall all of his works as stunningly poignant. I recall reading Brideshead Revisited, and feeling so much pain but in such an elegant, viscerally beautiful way. I had to keep putting the book down to feel and metabolize it all.
I think this is making me want to go back and read both of those works.
As for the experiment, that is ghastly. Ugh. I had chills reading that. I know a British man whose father insisted during the late 40s and 50s when the family was living abroad, having been part of the Raj, and the elder son was sent back to the UK at age 8. When it was my friend's turn, as he was the younger boy, the mother said essentially, "Over my dead body", and took her younger son and herself back to the UK, leaving the aspiring dad behind.
The pain of breaking up the family like that, because of a classist need to groom a small boy: gross and inhumane. When all the attendant emotional fallout was described to me, it made me angry at your entire so-called "public" system of educating boys to be whatever that was supposed to be. What *was* it supposed to be? Linear pillars of masculinity with no bends toward kindness and femininity, as in the centripetal force that allows a person to be receptive?
My god, the Romans and the legacy they left you with all their ferocity of militant precision; it really messed up masculinity for the Brits.
Watching the bizarre antics of Boris Johnson from over here where yes, we have the terrifying circus (a Roman reference, yet again) that we have -- and feel free to excoriate it as it would be correct, I am sure -- I just couldn't help but think that of course you would have Bozo BoJo and his Merry Men on parade because that is the natural conclusion of what has been done to men and their natural process of maturation by having stuck them all in Eton first.
Oh dammit, wrote a long reply and lost it by mucking around! But your Roman comparison is v interesting - of course all those schools are (or at least were) totally obsessed with Latin and Greek - there's definitely something about the supposed 'purity' of 'Classical culture' (code for no smelly girls and girlish concerns, and no outsiders) that captivates a certain kind of public-school-educated man, Johnson being a prime example of course.
It's a lot to do with Empire as well - the need to produce a militaristic class of administrators who were prepared to travel thousands of miles and run a system based on injustice and violence, while telling themselves they were jolly good chaps.
(I feel compelled to say - because a couple of my friends send their kids to top public schools! - that I don't know that things are so bad in those schools now. I mean, I literally don't know, and personally would never ever contemplate sending children away, but I do know some people who do it and they're very confident that the ethos of the schools is very different now. And god knows I've done some things with my kids that they are probably personally horrified by too, so I try not to be too condemnatory!)
Wow. Never thought of that so clearly before. It dovetails with other things I have been thinking, however. Thank you, Rowan (that is my son's name, fwiw).
As for you not wanting to fully condemn your public education system (which is actually private), I can do it for you by casting aspersions glibly across the big pond from over here in meltingly hot America where we have *everything* figured out for you there in the meltingly hot UK. :)
I agree! It suits him, too. He is quite fiery, as the name implies. It came to me in a dream where I seemed to think I would be having a daughter, which I did not, obvi. I might have used the name regardless, since it is redolent of Scotland, a place which figures largely in my life, so it wasn't a stretch to give him a moniker of a place I love so well. And then of course, I am one who believes that we ultimately have nothing to do with how our children are named other than to be the vessel through which the Soul operates to ensure the kid gets the namely resonance they expected in this carnation. But that's just me. :)
Great piece. I was at a school like your brother's, a minor London public school - stunning levels of abuse really sums it up! I don't know the film and I don't plan to vote for any Old Etonians, ever!
I mean, it was being at a minor London public school that made me a communist (as everyone should be at 17) - once you've experienced the inequality, injustice and indulgence it's hard not to want something better than Etonians in government
Superb read! Never seen the film and now totally inspired to do so.
Oh my word. Would be very interested to see what you think
What a fantastic piece. You will be thrilled?/distraught? to hear that I saw the play in the West End with D Day Lewis as Guy Bennett *and that we went to the stage door afterwards and told him we thought he was 'awfully good' and he said 'thanks'.*
My interest *was* erotic (in the peri-pubertal way of 'pashes' etc). I think this is now a recognised 'thing' in girls, with a dedicated Manga genre: https://savvytokyo.com/boys-love-the-genre-that-liberates-japanese-women-to-create-a-world-of-their-own/)
But there was also a kind of sexualisation or fetishization of class in the ether at that time - cf Tatler, and an obsession with glittering balls (dance ones) and brittle decadence. And at the very top, Brideshead Revisited, featuring both sexy upper classes and sexy near-sex between beautiful boys, and with which the whole culture seemed to be obsessed in 1981-2. My entire girls' school form was *agog* at that one, and at least two or three trailed around with their own Aloysius bears.
I cannot imagine sexing a Tory now, obviously.
I love this. I am so glad you guys are reviewing all these things from my adolescence and young adulthood. It is wonderful to be given an opportunity to reconsider what I thought then, what moved me then, how I felt, and compare it to now.
For example, the first time I read The Razor's Edge, I was 19. I read it again when I was 40 something and it went from being my most favorite book to being a nostalgic memory of how romantic I had been about my life and future, and a reminder of how much I had changed and what dreams had to be dropped if I were to move forward.
I saw the movie again around that time and found I did not like it as well as I did the first time.
Another Country, though, I always found very sad. The longing and pain of being dumped into a place where children were supposed to be made into whatever the God and Country needed them to be, and damn who they really were. So barbaric, that part of Britishness. Sorry. :(
Is there a Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons review anywhere in here...? I will have to go look
Thanks Whitney. I haven't read The Razor's Edge (actually have never read any Maugham at all which is a bit rubbish of me) but yes, it's quite powerful how these cultural artefacts unlock older versions of yourself and give you a sort of lens to view your various selves with. All very self-obsessed obviously but sometimes there are wider themes hiding in there too.
Boarding schools are a total mystery to me. My bro didn't board, my mother would never have gone for that - she'd worked as a researcher on a review of public schools set up by the Labour government in the '60s, and her job had been to read the diaries of young boys sent away to board at around the age of 8 (!!!). She said their first few months of diary entries were full of despair and loneliness and homesickness, but that if you took the same boy and looked at his diary entries from several years later you would find no trace of the previous sadness, and that in follow-up interviews where the diary entries were read to the boys they flatly denied that they could ever have written them and thought there must have been misattribution or mistakes because they'd always loved boarding. Really scary stuff. (As I understand it the diaries were written specifically for the research project and the boys knew other people would be reading them - just read this back and realised it sounded creepy!)
We haven't done Brideshead yet but we did rewatch it recently and I read the book (for the first time) - the book is absolutely brilliant, Waugh really could write (I know how ridiculous that sounds but I was really taken aback by how beautiful the writing was). We're thinking about what we might do with it...
My all-time favorite Waugh work is The Loved One. I laughed so hard, I cried when I read that, but of course, that was in 1989 or thereabouts. It's probably time I revisit that one, too. But, yes, I do recall all of his works as stunningly poignant. I recall reading Brideshead Revisited, and feeling so much pain but in such an elegant, viscerally beautiful way. I had to keep putting the book down to feel and metabolize it all.
I think this is making me want to go back and read both of those works.
As for the experiment, that is ghastly. Ugh. I had chills reading that. I know a British man whose father insisted during the late 40s and 50s when the family was living abroad, having been part of the Raj, and the elder son was sent back to the UK at age 8. When it was my friend's turn, as he was the younger boy, the mother said essentially, "Over my dead body", and took her younger son and herself back to the UK, leaving the aspiring dad behind.
The pain of breaking up the family like that, because of a classist need to groom a small boy: gross and inhumane. When all the attendant emotional fallout was described to me, it made me angry at your entire so-called "public" system of educating boys to be whatever that was supposed to be. What *was* it supposed to be? Linear pillars of masculinity with no bends toward kindness and femininity, as in the centripetal force that allows a person to be receptive?
My god, the Romans and the legacy they left you with all their ferocity of militant precision; it really messed up masculinity for the Brits.
Watching the bizarre antics of Boris Johnson from over here where yes, we have the terrifying circus (a Roman reference, yet again) that we have -- and feel free to excoriate it as it would be correct, I am sure -- I just couldn't help but think that of course you would have Bozo BoJo and his Merry Men on parade because that is the natural conclusion of what has been done to men and their natural process of maturation by having stuck them all in Eton first.
Oh dammit, wrote a long reply and lost it by mucking around! But your Roman comparison is v interesting - of course all those schools are (or at least were) totally obsessed with Latin and Greek - there's definitely something about the supposed 'purity' of 'Classical culture' (code for no smelly girls and girlish concerns, and no outsiders) that captivates a certain kind of public-school-educated man, Johnson being a prime example of course.
It's a lot to do with Empire as well - the need to produce a militaristic class of administrators who were prepared to travel thousands of miles and run a system based on injustice and violence, while telling themselves they were jolly good chaps.
(I feel compelled to say - because a couple of my friends send their kids to top public schools! - that I don't know that things are so bad in those schools now. I mean, I literally don't know, and personally would never ever contemplate sending children away, but I do know some people who do it and they're very confident that the ethos of the schools is very different now. And god knows I've done some things with my kids that they are probably personally horrified by too, so I try not to be too condemnatory!)
Wow. Never thought of that so clearly before. It dovetails with other things I have been thinking, however. Thank you, Rowan (that is my son's name, fwiw).
As for you not wanting to fully condemn your public education system (which is actually private), I can do it for you by casting aspersions glibly across the big pond from over here in meltingly hot America where we have *everything* figured out for you there in the meltingly hot UK. :)
Ha!
Congrats to your son, it's an ^excellent^ name ;-)
I agree! It suits him, too. He is quite fiery, as the name implies. It came to me in a dream where I seemed to think I would be having a daughter, which I did not, obvi. I might have used the name regardless, since it is redolent of Scotland, a place which figures largely in my life, so it wasn't a stretch to give him a moniker of a place I love so well. And then of course, I am one who believes that we ultimately have nothing to do with how our children are named other than to be the vessel through which the Soul operates to ensure the kid gets the namely resonance they expected in this carnation. But that's just me. :)
Great piece. I was at a school like your brother's, a minor London public school - stunning levels of abuse really sums it up! I don't know the film and I don't plan to vote for any Old Etonians, ever!
I mean, it was being at a minor London public school that made me a communist (as everyone should be at 17) - once you've experienced the inequality, injustice and indulgence it's hard not to want something better than Etonians in government
It turned me into a hippy. But I guess that wasn't a bad thing.
My God, what a beautiful take. Well written post!
Thank you Mark! This one has been tumbling around my brain for years