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The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends
'[The Brideshead Generation] has both style and substance, and is above all an enjoyable companion. It has a wildly amusing cast, here controlled by a skilful director.' Evening Standard'Jovial and entertaining, full of the sort of stories that your friends will tell you if you don't read it before them.' Independent'Carpenter has read widely and has collected an enormous fund of entertaining stories and facts.' Sunday Telegraph'Hauntingly sad and wonderfully funny and by far the best thing Humphrey Carpenter has done.' Fiona MacCarthy, The Times
810 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1989
2 people are currently reading
182 people want to read
About the author
Humphrey Carpenter
98 books87 followersHumphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was an English biographer, writer, and radio broadcaster. He is known especially for his biographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and other members of the literary society the Inklings. He won a Mythopoeic Award for his book The Inklings in 1982.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 11, 2012
Charming is the word here. Carpenter does an excellent job showing us what makes this crew (Greene, Green, Waugh, Connolly, Powell, Betjeman) so attractive, without denying the genuinely silly or offensive side of their lives. The stress is on Waugh, which is probably a little unfair; even if you want to say he was the most talented of the group, it's fair to say Green, Greene and Powell all produced more impressive work- and I say this as a Waugh-lover. But you won't even notice as you read. You could call the book 'novelistic' if people still wrote novels that were as readable as Greene's or Powell's, but since they don't calling this novelistic might be an insult. He's also surprisingly acute on his brief sections on the novels, although prone to a bit too much make too much of the biographical detail's relationship to the gents' literary production. Highly recommended.
November 10, 2012
I feel a bit mean only giving this 3 stars, because parts of this book are outstanding and worthy of 5 stars, but parts of it really let it down.
The opening sections, in which Carpenter paints a wide-ranging and vivid picture of the Oxford context in which Waugh was educated and illustrates the aristocratic milieu to which Waugh always yearned (never entirely successfully) to belong, cannot be faulted. Meticulous use of multiple sources, including first-hand testimony from those who were there (principally Harold Acton), enables Carpenter to create so authentic a sense of the decadent Twenties that I almost felt like I was there, too.
He also handles Waugh's life immediately after leaving Oxford well, telling his story in parallel with many of his contemporaries.
It is when the focus of the book narrows almost exclusively to Waugh (possibly the point at which Acton lost touch with him, rendering Carpenter's most lively source redundant? Just a hunch - I have no idea), with occasional discussion of Greene, Connolly and Betjeman, and Carpenter falls back on a heavy-handed, amateur psychologist reading of Waugh's novels that the book starts to flounder. Carpenter's repetitive attempts to read the influence of "Alice In Wonderland" and/or Waugh's sibling rivalry with Alec into absolutely bloody everything quickly become wearisome and read like a C grade piece of 'A' level English coursework. His simplistic reduction of "Brideshead Revisited" to a roman a clef, where he plays spot-the-real-life-figure-behind-the-character, is particularly painful, especially when he has to acknowledge that some characters are, in respects, not at all like the real-life figure he has assigned to them and has to resort to some highly dubious arguments to force them into the mould.
Waugh undoubtedly did draw on his own biography in his novels, but anyone choosing to read this book will almost certainly have previously read Waugh's novels and will be amply well placed to draw their own conclusions about the extent to which Waugh's characters have been borrowed form his life - carpenter doesn't have to do it for us and thrust his own half-baked theories down our throats as if they were fact.
Other painful moments include the points where he suggests that Powell's "A Dance To The Music Of Time" must have been influenced by "Brideshead Revisited" because they both have first-person narrators (!), where he uses the fact that characters are known as "Uncle" to argue that they must actually represent blood relations and his forced reading of Basil Seal's accident with explosions as emblematic of the effect of Waugh's own "explosive" behaviour.
That said, the section on Waugh's Gilbert Pinfold episode is chilling and sad and did something to stop me abandoning the book before the finish.
Overall, an impressive achievement, but would have been far more impressive without the embarrassing efforts at lit crit.
The opening sections, in which Carpenter paints a wide-ranging and vivid picture of the Oxford context in which Waugh was educated and illustrates the aristocratic milieu to which Waugh always yearned (never entirely successfully) to belong, cannot be faulted. Meticulous use of multiple sources, including first-hand testimony from those who were there (principally Harold Acton), enables Carpenter to create so authentic a sense of the decadent Twenties that I almost felt like I was there, too.
He also handles Waugh's life immediately after leaving Oxford well, telling his story in parallel with many of his contemporaries.
It is when the focus of the book narrows almost exclusively to Waugh (possibly the point at which Acton lost touch with him, rendering Carpenter's most lively source redundant? Just a hunch - I have no idea), with occasional discussion of Greene, Connolly and Betjeman, and Carpenter falls back on a heavy-handed, amateur psychologist reading of Waugh's novels that the book starts to flounder. Carpenter's repetitive attempts to read the influence of "Alice In Wonderland" and/or Waugh's sibling rivalry with Alec into absolutely bloody everything quickly become wearisome and read like a C grade piece of 'A' level English coursework. His simplistic reduction of "Brideshead Revisited" to a roman a clef, where he plays spot-the-real-life-figure-behind-the-character, is particularly painful, especially when he has to acknowledge that some characters are, in respects, not at all like the real-life figure he has assigned to them and has to resort to some highly dubious arguments to force them into the mould.
Waugh undoubtedly did draw on his own biography in his novels, but anyone choosing to read this book will almost certainly have previously read Waugh's novels and will be amply well placed to draw their own conclusions about the extent to which Waugh's characters have been borrowed form his life - carpenter doesn't have to do it for us and thrust his own half-baked theories down our throats as if they were fact.
Other painful moments include the points where he suggests that Powell's "A Dance To The Music Of Time" must have been influenced by "Brideshead Revisited" because they both have first-person narrators (!), where he uses the fact that characters are known as "Uncle" to argue that they must actually represent blood relations and his forced reading of Basil Seal's accident with explosions as emblematic of the effect of Waugh's own "explosive" behaviour.
That said, the section on Waugh's Gilbert Pinfold episode is chilling and sad and did something to stop me abandoning the book before the finish.
Overall, an impressive achievement, but would have been far more impressive without the embarrassing efforts at lit crit.
March 1, 2023
It may be unfair of me to give this just three stars but I wasn't really impressed. I am tired of the whole 1920s literary/social/gossip/parties/bright young things etc. etc. etc. orgy of back slapping congratulations and lumping together of writers who did know each other but in many cases are not in anyway connected after their time in Oxford - and even then many didn't really know each other - many weren't even there at the same time.
What matters in the end are the books - are they worth reading - are they being read - the answer is yes to both those questions but not for all the authors mentioned. Some have faded out of sight in the last thirty years and like them this book two has faded in relevance and interest.
There are good books, even older books which can tell us many interesting things about this period and these writers, but don't go to this one. It has had its day.
What matters in the end are the books - are they worth reading - are they being read - the answer is yes to both those questions but not for all the authors mentioned. Some have faded out of sight in the last thirty years and like them this book two has faded in relevance and interest.
There are good books, even older books which can tell us many interesting things about this period and these writers, but don't go to this one. It has had its day.
February 3, 2010
Carpenter provides a good portrait of a talented group, including Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, and Harold Acton, beginning with their lives at public school (usually Eton) and at Oxford. It's a little more a biography of Waugh than of the whole group, but Carpenter does keep up with the others, following them and Waugh through their careers and personal lives. It's a thoughtful and balanced portrait which made me want to read more about several of them, particularly Acton and Betjeman.
June 14, 2022
evelyn waugh: answering the question of how many times you can say “this fucking guy” about one person
overall this was pretty good. i guess it’s understandable bc it’s a biography of sorts, but sometimes i did feel that the author was trying to pigeonhole a lot of waugh’s work into his real life experiences — some of the time it made sense, but other times i felt that it was a stretch
overall this was pretty good. i guess it’s understandable bc it’s a biography of sorts, but sometimes i did feel that the author was trying to pigeonhole a lot of waugh’s work into his real life experiences — some of the time it made sense, but other times i felt that it was a stretch
November 7, 2022
I did like this quite a lot, but I stopped reading before the very end. I know authors are not necessarily wonderful people to hang around with. However, I found myself really starting to dislike Evelyn Waugh. I started becoming afraid it would color my views of "Brideshead Revisited," which is one of my favorite books and films (the ITV one, not the sorry film with Ben Whishaw).
April 17, 2022
Finished reading The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter. An excellent review of the age of Evelyn Waugh and his friends; the reduction of rudeness to a fine art and the creation of a social identity which is implicitly aristocratic to enable you to look down on others.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews