'WITH ONE CHAINED FRIEND, PERHAPS A JEALOUS FOE THE DREARIEST AND THE LONGEST JOURNEY GO'

In the odd event that we meet again -- a missive to keep in the wallet

Souls in cupped hands (a waste; tis an aether)

Sigils in red ink, burnt in the flesh

A drowned woman, dragged upstream by a bear (the face is intact)

Devils pretending to enjoy art (your friends are enthralled)

'Alástor' came to me in a dream; under the furs he was rotten. He would have sloughed had I touched him (so I did not). He would take my letters beneath, to our shared friend, but the truth is neither got back to me. His eyes shone bright, bright, bright.

He or she was an acolyte of St Patrick. Very little is known of them. On the properties of prayer: Passion may precede belief. One may not believe at all and be struck by savage guilt or beauty or benevolence all at once. The truth of this world is that there is only one and that it is continuously eating itself. The big parts eat the little ones, and the little parts swarm them. Until we plowed fields hunger was a mode of regulation, like molten rock and sea.

TAREA

WHO WERE THE BRIGHT & YOUNG?

BEVERLEY NICHOLS - ALL I COULD NEVER BE 1949
BYP - [p. 3]
It was an age of "parties." There were "white" parties in which we shot down to the country in fleets of cars, dressed in white from head to foot, and danced on a

white floor laid in the orchard, with the moonlight turning all the apples to silver, and then -- in a pale pink dawn -- playing races with champagne corks on the

surface of the stream. There were Mozart parties in which, powdered and peruked, we danced by candlelight and then -- suddenly bored -- rushed out into the street to

join a gang excavating the gas mains at Hyde Park Corner. There were swimming parties where, at midnight, we descended on some municipal baths, hired for the occasion,

and disported ourselves with an abandon that was all the fiercer because we knew that the press was watching -- and watching with a very disapproving eye.


BYP [p. 8]
Its members ranged from the rich and aristocratic -- Bryan Guinness on his marriage to Diana Mitford in 1929 was supposed to have acquired an income of L. 20,000 a

year -- to the downright disreputable. Some Bright Young People became successful writers, journalists or artists, while others plumbed the depths of drink, drugs and

disappointment.

ALAN JENKINS: the words Bright Young People became a label for all the young in Britain who did anything unusual at all

[...] Given that many of the Bright Young People were artists, albeit sometimes in very minor and inconsequential ways, their spoor can be tracked across vast acreages

of British cultural life. Their style -- brisk, affected, outwardly impersonal, inwardly often deeply vulnerable -- influenced a host of descendants who knew nothing

of their ancestry, and their echoes can be found in the pages of books written long after the movement's original members were gone. [pp. 8-9]


ON THE PHOTOGRAPH AT WILSFORD MANOR
[p. 10] It is an extraordinary portrait-- stylised, sophisticated, ultramodern, and yet, in its dandy posturing, hugely frivolous and self-centred, an image that, in

the end, conveys nothing but its own artificiality.


ET IN ARCADIA EGO
[p. 12] The influence of the Bright Young People can be felt throughout twentieth century artistic life. To take on the most flagrant examples, the London society

world of the mid- to late 1920s was a crucible in which were forged the careers of several of England's greatest novelists, one of its best-loved contemporary poets

and half a dozen leading figures in ballet, photography and surrealist painting. Beneath the surface hubbub lay, too, a deep strain of unease, often extending to

outright melancholy. Raised in the shadow of the Great War, denied most of the social and economic certainties of their parents' generation, the Bright Young People

knew, if they had any sense of perspective, that their pleasures came at a price, that somewhere in the middle distance a reckoning awaited. "It is a queer world which

the old men have left them," Evelyn Waugh wrote in a valedictory editorial for his school magazine, considering the plight of what he called "the youngest generation,"

"and they will have few ideals and illusions to console them when they 'get to feeling old.' They will not be a happy generation."


STEPHEN TENNANT AS SEBASTIAN I -- THE CULT OF YOUTH & BEAUTY
THE DAILY EXPRESS 1926 OR 27
[pp. 24-25] His appearance alone is enough to make you catch your breath -- golden hair spreading in flowing waves across a delicate forehead; an ethereally

transparent face; clothes which mold themselves about his slim figure [...]"


MANY MEETINGS
[p. 29] The median date of birth was around 1905. [...] If age brought consanguinity, then so did the alliances of school and university. Eleanor Smith and Zita

Jungman had been at Miss Douglas's establishment at Queen's Gate with Alannah Harper. The founding members of the Eton Society of the Arts in 1920 included Howard,

Yorke, Harold Acton and Anthony Powell. Evelyn Waugh and Tom Driberg first came across each other at Lansing College. Oxford, too, became a Bright Young Person's

Nursery. The legacy of the war, manifested in gruff ex-servicemen who referred to the dining hall as "mess" and the legend of the misbehaving former officer

apprehended by a proctor's bulldog who turned out to be his batman, had dissipated by about 1922, after which the most fashionable colleges, Magdalen and Christ

Church, were dominated by a new breed of undergraduates, predominantly Old Etonians notable for the flamboyance of their dress and manner.

THE 'ISIS' ON THE HYPOCRITES' CLUB:
[p. 30] The Hypocrites are perhaps the most entertaining people in the University. They express their souls in terms of shirts and gray flannel trousers and find

outlet for their artistic ability on the walls of their clubrooms. To talk to they are rather alarming. They have succeeded in picking up a whole series of

intellectual catch-phrases with which they proceed to dazzle their friends and frighten their acquaintance: and they are the only people I have ever met who have

reduced rudeness to a fine art.


GENERATIONAL DIVIDE -- SURVIVOR'S GUILT & THE HEROIC DEAD
[pp. 54-55] Coming only a few years after a devastating war that obliterated hundreds of thousands of young men, the antagonism between youth and seniority that

characterized the 1920s was of far greater significance than previous intergenerational disturbance. For all the enthusiasm for "youth," the talk of "new blood" and

the need to sweep away prewar stuffiness, the twenties, practically every commentator of the period agrees, was a difficult time to be a young man. Part of this

difficulty lay in the simple fact of his existence. Orwell, a decade later, noted the tremendous amount of guilt experienced by the young man born in the years after

1900 who, consequently, had managed to avoid military service. "The very fact of his being alive was against him," Balfour declared, "for he was thus prevented from

standing level with 'the boys who had died.'" Whatever feats he accomplished, he would always be compared, and nearly always unfavourably, with the war generation lost

in the Flanders mud.

But there was more to these anxieties than a sense of generational inferiority. To a failure to emulate the achievements of those killed in the war could be added the

insecurities of the new postwar landscape, where jobs were scarce and whole areas of employment seemed set aside for the jealous middle-aged. On the one hand the

peculiarly charged atmosphere of the 1920s, with its promise of good times and limitless horizons, had raised expectations among the young; on the other the reality of

its economic pressures had simultaneously let them down. Cyril Connolly noted the reluctance of his contemporaries to accept the routine compromises that had done for

their fathers: "They could not settle down to boring jobs and unprofitable careers with prewar patience and their cleverness seemed a liability rather than an asset."

Balfour, alternatively, identified a gap between the kind of person that the public school system had launched on the social world of the 1920s ("a gentleman and a

gentleman of leisure") and the kind of person -- tough-minded, competitive and hardworking -- required by the postwar labour market. The Bright Young Man, Balfour

thought, was "a hybrid, hovering between two worlds and two systems."

Morning Mournings

I am inclined to believe that Brideshead Revisited is a book about missed connections & misunderstandings, of, yes, thwarted passion; of giving a sad proud look when one should weep; of the “well then”. Most of the characters try too hard, or not enough.

Charles left, after being made a sufferer. I suppose missing Sebastian was better than sharing in the misery – but the smell of summer, made the stench of sickness, is not one that washes off. It is a dark stain on the breast.

Stifled grief, English charm – composure. So he wore the mask and saw himself become it. So growth stilled.

APRIL IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH, BREEDING
LILACS OUT OF THE DEAD LAND, MIXING
MEMORY AND DESIRE, STIRRING
DULL ROOTS WITH SPRING RAIN

Eliot

Yellow finches dart in pairs, unencumbered by Fate, no red string to trip them in their flight. It is said this long red string is used by men to remember the way out – as one lost in a dark wood, where trunks make walls and rivers rush beneath the earth, to swallow one if he missteps. (Of course one is never in danger – a tug and one misses a trap – as if a strange god whispered, Turn left, turn left, one unaware they had heard him.)

I do not think a finch would know what that is.

Man should know the string for a safety – fallible, as in truth it may be cut. But men live of what isn’t theirs. (You can’t live off what isn’t yours!)

                TRUTH IS AN ODD NUMBER, THERE IS SAFETY IN A TRIAD

The dead come out the strangest doors. The wan face a familiar sight, all fear is struck from one. (What one fears is the lifting of veils.) The smile is a stiff lip on yellow waxwork. Still there is light in the eyes – a taxidermist’s prize, such shine one would think they had blinked away a tear. Our precious dead! Are we not ghosts all, loves and hates and curious scenes, misremembered? A distortion, approximation, which is imagination, (which is Poetry, which is Truth).

What is dead will go the moment one raises a trembling hand – to the face, perhaps, in a fever of feeling. If dead men have fevers of feeling I do not know. The dead may stir in alien ways. For even the soulless are capable of some fondness, a detached benevolence, in spite of their diminished capacities.

The small man in spectacles no longer says, “My wife is lost at sea!” She has come to him in dreams, mottled and bent, to tell him of her marriage to a sea-prince.

Come morning he coughs a wad of green. A piece of soul is broken off and drifted, like an aether, not to be held in cupped hands or blown on lover’s lips.

Ah, to have many affections in place of one mad love! That is what he should have done. Grief would be brief (being not quite grief, then). “Wait, wait, give me a minute,” to put a stopper to the wound as easily as one caps a bottle.

Ah, had he not loved his wife…!

When they wed he did not care much for her. Then he was certain of everything. That she was a practical, sensible sort; that she would have his best interests in mind, and try not to make him unhappy. A good prospect, in appearance unremarkable.

One night he woke from a dreadful dream, since forgotten. (Vines, and vines, and damp.) Crinkling an eye at the back turned to him – the curve of that bone! That steady breath – he knew he loved her then. For quite some time, he had loved her; but it was then that it hit him, that he was made aware of the fact. “Well then,” he said, for in his many years he had never been in love, and knew it not as a cruel master.

A year from then she was sailing the Atlantic. Misty-eyed, she promised him a letter; she gave him her love, though he knew she’d find another. All her things, she too shipped west, answering thus the question of return. She had lost something he could not see, she said, and could not help her find. A burden, he would be – this, in kinder words. (“You would not know it,” which is a form of saying, “You do not know me.”)

In a week the ship was wrecked, her bones picked clean by bottom-feeders.

(“Do terns flock here in the summer? Do they hatch soft, speckled babes?”

Location

“That was somewhere else.” There lives a shade of myself, who faces West at the cry of gulls, and dreams of mine own sorrow; a small man like myself, when I had but one chin, and bled brackish blood.

I’d call my man at Ingolstadt to electrify my loins, if sheer vigour were enough to rouse you from the deep. If white worms grace your chest like flowers, slick stalks nibbling here and there, I will tie them head to tail in a funereal wreath.)

Psicoanalízame ésta.