April Vanity Fair article on a new book about Waugh and his life with the Lygon family (prototype of the Marchmains?)
Waugh and Brideshead | Culture | Vanity Fair
a cast reunion radio program broadcast last Sunday
BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - The Reunion, Brideshead Revisited
Waugh's description of what he thought his novel about in a memo to
the Californian Savages (Hollywood)describing important points in film adaptation. It seems the makers of the 2008 film didn't get the memo.
Waugh versus Hollywood | Film | The Guardian
Theme
The theme is theological. It is in no sense abstruse and is based on principles that have for nearly 2,000 years been understood by millions of simple people, and are still so understood. But it is, I think, the first time that an attempt will have been made to introduce them to the screen, and they are antithetical to much of the current philosophy of Hollywood. It is for this reason that I venture to restate them briefly here:
1. The novel deals with what is theologically termed, "the operation of Grace", that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself;
2. Grace is not confined to the happy, prosperous and conventionally virtuous. There is no stereotyped religious habit of life, as may be seen from the vastly dissimilar characters of the canonised saints. God has a separate plan for each individual by which he or she may find salvation. The story of Brideshead Revisited seeks to show the working of several such plans in the lives of a single family;
3. The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control on human souls which have once been part of her. GK Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water, and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a "twitch upon the thread" draws the fish to land.
This metaphor appears twice in the novel and should be retained.
...
Charles meets Julia on board ship returning to England from America, and although they have never been close to one another, and there has been no suggestion of a love affair between them, it should be delicately suggested that both of them were conscious that they were in some way fated to be of vital importance in one another's life [sic]. It is not the "plan" that they should be lovers, in fact the importance of which they are conscious is really that each is to bring the other to the Church; but defiantly they do become lovers.
...
It is important that the priest should be as unlike as possible to any priest hitherto represented in Hollywood. He must be a practical, single man. Doing his job in a humdrum way... I regard it as important that in some way it should be made plain that Charles is reconciled to Julia's renunciation. He has realised that the way they were going was not the way ordained for them, and that the physical dissolution of the house of Brideshead has in fact been a spiritual regeneration.
