Question comparing 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Brideshead Revisited'

I remember the Great Gatsby better than Brideshead Revisited.

I seem to remember that BR is more nostalgic, more about how much better things were in the past than they are now. Whereas GG is more about how there are new opportunities and the old ways are stultifying and dangerous.

I absolutely don't stand by that (would need to at least flip through both to remind myself) but maybe that can get some wheels turning.

Whoever suggested that camparison is either shallow or ignorant. England suffered horribly from the Great War, and suffered particularly in the highly educated classes. She lost a much higher proportion of her population than did the United States, and ended the war exhausted. In the preface to the 1968 edition of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien said that of the young men in his year at Oxford, only he and four others had survived the war.

The United States, by contrast, entered the war with optimism and a certain amount of contempt for tired, old Europe. They had the attitude that they were getting Europe out of the mess into which they had gotten themselves. Total American casualties for the war were less than England suffered in the first week of the Somme campaign in 1916. By the time of last offensive in 1918, we had put over one million men into France. By 1919, when Americans took over the occupation of Germany, we had three million troops in France, Belgium and Germany.

Americans took the attitude that they had won the war; that they could accomplish anything. They were upbeat and positive. The flappers and the "sheiks" of the roaring twenties were just partaking of this self-congratulatory hysteria and optimism. In England, the mood was one of fatalism, of a generation destroyed, of no hope and no future.

It is ridiculous to compare the two attitudes.

Well, the classic English paper format is compare and contrast.

So you just provided a lot of meat for the contrast.

edit: But on re-reading the intro, it does seem to suggest that England and America emerged from the war with approximately the same attitude, which doesn't seem correct.

What happened to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland?

Has anybody in here heard of "Britain"?

I have written extensively about both writers and both novels> I post some of my writing below. Readers here can do with it what they desire....with no simple answers.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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CHANGING ORDERS

They were a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. -Scott Fitzgerald in Freud, Religion and the Roaring Twenties: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Secularization in Three Novelists--Anderson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Henry Idema III, Rowman& Littlefield Pub., 1990, p.5.

An old world was dieing
all around them as they*
laid the foundation for
the new one so few knew.

At the Somme and
Passchendaele the
dull thunder of the guns,
the trench warfare
saw millions die while
He quietly penned more
Tablets** for a different
kind of war for a new Order.
It was just then taking its
first form as that great war
was enduing and orders were
changing directions and forms.

But it all happened so quietly
as noise changed the face of Europe,
as religions died on the battlefield
and people in the millions turned to
sex, alcohol and secular substitutes.

They roared into the twenties with
the flapper, bathtub gin, howling jazz,
silent screen movies, lavish mansions,
sleek automobiles, and lots of glitter
and tinsel--missing the first formative
years of an Order that would change
the face of history, and exhaust the
energiesof a young man and make him
oldbefore his time; holding the world,
thenew Order on his shoulders was too
muchas the world went hedonistic, went
for pleasure—and millions still are caught.
* they='Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi
** Tablets= Tablets of the Divine Plan

Ron Price 5/4/’96 to 22/5/’13.

EARLY PACKAGING BY AN EAGLE’S WINGS

All the sad young men of Scott Fitzgerald, and the lost generation of Ernest Hemingway, are seekers for landmarks and bearings in a terrain for which the maps have been mislaid. Theirs was the God-abandoned world of modernity where individuals define their own code, summon the necessary discipline, if possible, and make their story: tragic, pitiful, human, an infinity of secular trajectories through space, with nature as all and nothing at the centre, except perhaps a slowly crafted self with all its ambiguities and mysteries, some old and tired religion, and immense quantities of popular-literary psychology. -Ron Price, with thanks to Robert Penn Warren for his “Ernest Hemingway”, Modern Critical Views: Ernest Hemingway, editor, Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp.35-62.

The Order was just taking form, then,
and happiness far removed from the
glitter-and-tinsel of mere sensations,
astonishing immediacy, flourishing
moments of now…A freshness was
found in depth and poignancy in a
vision of oneness quite profound
and a background of civilization
gone to pot, war and death with a
gratification raised to cult-status—
sensation…A whole new basis for
the intellect deeply laid in the life
of a new God-man, two God-men,
three God-men now all gone: and
charisma institutionalizing, just
beginning to form in this new &
technologically united world.

For this new Form had been watered
with the blood of martyrs and more than
a century* of searching, finding, intense
discouragement, sweat and tears. Here
was new meaning, new wine in new bottles,
not just the accidents, changes and chances
that seem to form this mortal coil and human
naturestruggling intensely within confines.

Private spaces with fate, self and all that makes
this life of grandeur and emptiness, pleasure and
pain, simplicity and staggering complexity, small
places and an infinite universe. Here were faintest
beginnings back then, the earliest architecture: all
that pain and wonder packaged in an eagle’s wings.

Ron Price
26/2/’96 to 7/4/’13.

* Shayhk Ahmad left his home in 1792 and there followed a century of searching for the Promised One until 1892 when Baha’u’llah died. Slowly, after Baha’u’llah’s passing, the institutions of a new world Order began to form, especially after 1921. In the 1920s and 1930s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, among others, did most of their writing it was a remarkably creative literary epoch in America. The Baha’i administrative order, the precursor of a future world order, took the form which was necessary for the international teaching plan to operate within.

THE AGE WE LIVE IN

Part 1:

It is not so much my authorial ego, or that I am a compulsive self-historiographer, which compels me to document my life more fully than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was nine years old. In my lifetime the Baha'i administrative process, the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical growth period. I have been committed to the promises and possibilities of this new way of Life.1

As F. Scott Fitzgerald was committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new beginnings.

Part 2:

George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood "in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities of the age."2 The age I have lived in and through has also faced "significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt, can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.vii; and 2George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press, 1995, p.xviii.

I, too, saw myself as coming at
the end of a historical process,
so complex, staggeringly so. It
had its beginningsin the district
ofAhsa, those birds flying over
Akka,& those Men with beards
and I identified with it strongly.

I was born near the start of yet
another Formative Age:would
it last as long as the Greeks?1

I understood profoundly well
the claims of this new belief
as you did the claims of your
craft.2I was, like you, fortune's
darlingin this new age & I was,
too,the shell-shocked casualty
of a war that was more complex
than any of us could understand.

1 the Formative Age in ancient Greek civilization lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one which took place in modernity began 23 years before I was born and it’s still going strong.

2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between the wars: 1919-1939.
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REVISITING BRIDESHEAD

Revisiting Brideshead was televised last night.1 I had seen this 11 part series on television back in the 1980s or early 1990s after it first came out in 1981. I had not read the novel, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by English writer Evelyn Waugh which was first published in 1945. In 2015 I had the pleasure of seeing the 2008 film version.2 I wrote about the TV series and the film after I had retired from my 50 year life-experience as a student and in paid employment, 1949-1999, and after I had seen the series a second time in Australia.

The Flyte family who lived at Brideshead symbolises the English nobility, and Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy brings that nobility to life. One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age." Viewers, millions, enjoy the opulent and aristocratic edge, the glitter and gloss, the grandeur and the glamour of this wealthy family estate, and of a time in our history now quickly dying-out, if not long gone. In this one house, as one reviewer put it, is a fading, a dying, empire; or is it just sublime real estate. For many, in the millennial and generation Z, I can just about hear them clicking on the remote and uttering a now familiar word, a word especially familiar to people like me who retired after more than 30 years in classrooms: borrrring!

There's room for more than one Brideshead in this far less glamorous day and age, though, room at least for the baby-boomers and for the silent generation among the viewing public, with the glitter and gloss of society now often tarnished beyond repair in our complex 21st century.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2, 11:55-12:45, 19 & 20/9/’11, and 2ABCTV, 8/2/'15, 10:05-11:30 pm.

1981 was a bad year in the UK
with 2 & ½ million out of work
and a list of bad news to fill all
those English heads to the top.1

There was nothing like this bit
of escapism from the real world
into a nostalgic, a romanticized
past, homoerotic suggestiveness,
Evelyn Waugh’s WW2 vision.2

I’ll let all you readers find out
what it all meant to Waugh, to
his critics & to modern viewers
whose views are available for us
to see on that new source of info:
the internet, the world-wide-web.3

1 See Wikipedia for all the bad news in 1981.

2 Waugh wrote in the preface to the 1959 edition of the book that he was appalled by his book, and that he found rereading it distasteful. I was only 15 at the time, and had read none of Waugh. I lived in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in love with sport and at least 3 girls. The plot of the book was set in 1943-1944, in the months when I was in utero.

3 I was particularly interested in Waugh’s defence of Catholicism, his critique of secular humanism, and his emphasis on the many forms of conversion that take place in peoples’ lives.

Ron Price
20/9/'11 to 12/2/'15.
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BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

Part 1:

In the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 the novel Brideshead Revisited was written in England. In those same months I existed in utero on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. When Evelyn Waugh, the author of this novel, wrote his preface to a revised edition of the book in 1959, and Fr. Ronald Knox published his biography of Waugh in that same year---I was 15 and had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and was in the middle of my adolescent baseball and ice-hockey careers. By my 20s my sport-playing days had ended, although I have remained a Baha’i all my life.
Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 In the end, this is a common experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike, especially in our troubled-age. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2

Part 2:

Waugh saw this novel, Brideshead Revisited, as his magnum opus but, on reading it later in life, he found what he called its "rhetorical and ornamental language.....distasteful."3 Readers with the interest in this film and this novel should surf-about on Wikipedia and other internet sources for all sorts of bits-and-pieces of information and analysis.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh(1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, W.W. Norton & Co., NY., 1987 & 1992, resp., V.2, p.492; and3 Wikipedia.

Part 3:

Without Christianity you saw
civilization doomed or, as you
put it in your conversion: “it is
like stepping out of a Looking-
Glass world, where everything
is an absurd caricature, into the
real world God made, and then
begins the delicious process of
exploring it limitlessly.”1..This
is perhaps the most succinct &
sufficient description of process
in the act of conversions that ever
were written in that 20th century.

Waugh's own conversion from the
"absurd caricature" of what might
be called ultra-modernity to that
real world of Catholic orthodoxy
was greeted with astonishment by
the literary world and it caused a
sensation in the media. Do those
who have watched Brideshead in
these last 30 years know of this?
I did not until today and, wanting
to know something about how this
television series and film came into
existence in those last twenty-five
years: 1981 to 2007, I learned that
there was much to learn with a little
research and reading, and not even
reading E. Waugh's book at all.......

Part 4:

“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests."

Waugh concluded the above press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared in Lay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968.

Ron Price
14/7/'11 to 12/2/'15.
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I can give you more if you want more.-Ron