Brideshead today would not be derelict, he speculated, but “open to trippers”, and better maintained than Lord Marchmain, its fictional master, ever managed. In a preface written in 1959, Waugh noted that amid the wartime austerity of 1944 it had been “impossible to foresee…the present cult of the English country house”, many of which had in the intervening years found salvation in tourism. It turned out that an age of change loved escaping into faded glories. Waugh affected to find the book’s success across the Atlantic “upsetting because I thought it in good taste before and now I know it can’t be”. Yet even he predicted a triumph-and the novel duly became a bestseller in America, too. Sceptics included Edmund Wilson of the New Yorker, who excoriated the “mere romantic fantasy” of this “Catholic tract” disfigured by “shameless and rampant” snobbery. “Most of the reviews have been adulatory except where they were embittered by class resentment,” Waugh wrote. “Brideshead” sold very well-and critics adored it. With divine grace as his underlying theme and the time-encrusted splendours of the English Catholic elite as his frame, Waugh set out to give that past a last hurrah.īut this swansong heralded a strange rebirth. “We possess nothing certainly except the past,” muses Ryder. To the romantic reactionary Waugh, the undignified future belonged to Hooper, with his trademark, cheery chirp of “Rightyoh”.
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