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On Jeremy Irons’s Cheekbones |
Volume 29, Number 5
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The arts and the humanities seem to have much in common. Like the National Endowment for the Arts and
the National Endowment for the Humanities, two cultural agencies of the federal government located in
the same building in Washington, the arts and the humanities are taken to be neighbors: as close as
literature to literary criticism or history to historical drama. They have serious differences,
of course, and they are perceived differently. Bruce Fraser, head of the Connecticut Humanities
Council (www.ctculture.org), is quoted in this issue describing their respective reputations
as vivacious, for the arts, and quietly dutiful, for the humanities. (Actually, he puts the
matter much more eloquently in our
“In Focus” section.)
The arts and the humanities seem to have much in common. Like the National Endowment for the Arts and
the National Endowment for the Humanities, two cultural agencies of the federal government located in
the same building in Washington, the arts and the humanities are taken to be neighbors: as close as
literature to literary criticism or history to historical drama. They have serious differences,
of course, and they are perceived differently. Bruce Fraser, head of the Connecticut Humanities
Council, is quoted in this issue describing their respective reputations
as vivacious, for the arts, and quietly dutiful, for the humanities. (Actually, he puts the
matter much more eloquently in our
“In Focus” section.)
I thought of these differences as I took in the summer film Brideshead Revisited, which Evelyn Waugh fans know is an especially lean representation of the original novel. Pity the filmmakers who had to labor in the long shadow of Granada Television’s wildly popular thirteen-hour, small-screen version starring Jeremy Irons—its ultra faithful script practically a photocopy of the novel. And yet the new movie is a beautiful thing, especially gorgeous in its visual evocations of the Edwardian era and the fading glory of nineteenth-century English architecture and culture. Also, the movie is certainly vivacious; its first twenty minutes frenetic even.
I thought of these differences as I took in the summer film Brideshead Revisited, which Evelyn Waugh
fans know is an especially lean representation of the original novel. Pity the filmmakers who had
to labor in the long shadow of Granada Television’s (www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB
/bridesheadre/bridesheadre.htm)
wildly popular thirteen-hour, small-screen version starring Jeremy Irons—its ultra faithful script practically a photocopy of the novel. And yet the new movie is a beautiful thing, especially gorgeous in its visual evocations of the Edwardian era and the fading glory of nineteenth-century English architecture and culture. Also, the movie is certainly vivacious; its first twenty minutes frenetic even.
The novel is the opposite of frenetic. It begins with Charles Ryder going through the motions of army life, comparing himself to a husband “who, in the fourth year of marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife.” The wife in his case was the army, which had exposed the sensitive Ryder, an artist in civilian life, to the hideous drone of modernity, transistor radios playing incessantly, cheap architecture, uncultured know-it-alls like the young officer Hooper, who says about Hitler: “I reckon we could learn a thing or two from him.”
In Ryder’s mind, Hooper stands in for what the newspapers call Young England. The contrast is plainly visible with Brideshead, the estate and mansion of an old and rich English Catholic family of which Ryder had once been an intimate, where statuary of the old classical style abounds and medieval paintings of Mary adorn a private chapel. Surveying the grounds, with its winding stream and trees of oak and beech, Ryder comments that “all this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might be seen in its maturity.”
Old England is a world of wealth, refinement, beauty, and the work of centuries. Young England is Hooper, decades old, a mediocre soldier and representative of a future nation ignorant of its own past greatness. The 1981 TV version of this story perhaps owes more of its popularity to the excellence of Jeremy Irons’s cheekbones than the sunniness of Evelyn Waugh’s views. The same may be true of the book.
After watching the movie, I immediately picked up my old copy of the book. It’s not my favorite of Waugh’s books—instead I favor his early prewar comedies—but as I did so, it seemed to me that this was typical of the work in the humanities. Someone else performs, and we hit the books. There is something dutiful about it—but also something more than dutiful.
That something more can be seen in this issue of Humanities. It was for Cervantes to write Don Quixote; it was for others to translate; and now it is for Ilan Stavans to essay on the merits of these translations over time. Goya and Monet painted; Electra Havemeyer Webb collected them and other examples of high art, along with many curious pieces of folk art; the Shelburne Museum (www.shelburnemuseum.org) preserves and interprets, telling the stories of this innovative and delightful collector and the art she left behind. We in the humanities always seem to be in the second or third acts, and yet we proudly give wider scope to all these fascinating stories of human invention.
That something more can be seen in this issue of Humanities. It was for Cervantes to write Don Quixote; it was for others to translate; and now it is for Ilan Stavans to essay on the merits of these translations over time. Goya and Monet painted; Electra Havemeyer Webb collected them and other examples of high art, along with many curious pieces of folk art; the Shelburne Museum preserves and interprets, telling the stories of this innovative and delightful collector and the art she left behind. We in the humanities always seem to be in the second or third acts, and yet we proudly give wider scope to all these fascinating stories of human invention.
See