【英文文学】故园风雨后 Brideshead Revisited.docx

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1、【英文文学】故园风雨后 Brideshead RevisitedPrefaceTHIS novel, which is here re-issued with many small additions and some substantial cuts, lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers. Its theme - the operation of divine g

2、race on a group of diverse but closely connected characters - was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it. I am less happy about its form, whose more glaring defects may be blamed on the circumstances in which it was written.In December 1943 1 had the good fortune when parachuting

3、 to incur a minor injury which afforded me a rest from military service. This was extended by a sympathetic commanding officer, who let me remain unemployed until June 1944 when the book was finished. I wrote with a zest that was quite strange to me and also with impatience to get back to the war. I

4、t was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster - the period of soya beans and Basic English - and in consequence the, book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a fu

5、ll stomach I find distasteful. I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book.I have been in two minds as to the treatment of Julias outburst about mortal sin and Lord Marchmains dying soliloquy. These passages were never of course,

6、intended to report words actually spoken. They belong to a different way of writing from, say, the early scenes between Charles and his father. I would not now introduce them into a novel which elsewhere aims at verisimilitude. But I have retained them here in something near their original form beca

7、use, like the Burgundy (misprinted in many editions) and the moonlight they were essentially of the mood of writing; also because many readers liked them, though that is not a consideration of first importance. It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English coun

8、try house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity. Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearr

9、anged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain. And the English aristocracy has maintained its identity to a degree that then seemed impossible. The advance of Hooper has been held up at several points. Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an

10、 empty coffin. But it would be impossible to bring it up to date without totally destroying it. It is offered to a younger generation of readers as a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals. Combe Florey 1959 E.W.Chapter 1I HAVE been

11、here before, I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so man

12、y moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.That day, too, I had come not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford - submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding -in - Oxford, in those days, was still

13、a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newmans day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cu

14、polas exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, -over the intervening clamour. Here, discordantly, in Eights Week, came a rabble of womankind, some hundreds strong, twittering and fluttering over the

15、 cobbles and up the steps, sight-seeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches; pushed in punts about the river, herded in droves to the college barges; greeted in the Isis and in the Union by a sudden display of peculiar, facetious, wholly distressing Gilbert-and-Sull

16、ivan badinage, and by peculiar choral effects in the College chapels. Echoes of the intruders penetrated every corner, and in my own College was no echo, but an original fount of the grossest disturbance. We were giving a ball. The front quad, where I lived, was floored and tented; palms and azaleas

17、 were banked round the porters lodge; worst of all, the don who lived above me, a mouse of a man connected with the Natural Sciences, had lent his rooms for a Ladies Cloakroom, and a printed notice proclaiming this outrage hung not six inches from my oak.No one felt more strongly about it than my sc

18、out.Gentlemen who havent got ladies are asked as far as possible to take their meals out in the next few days, he announced despondently. Will you be lunching in? No, Lunt.So as to give the servants a chance, they say. What a chance! Ive got to buy a pin-cushion for the Ladies Cloakroom. What do the

19、y want with dancing? I dont see the reason in it. There never was dancing before in Eights Week. Commem. now is another matter being in the vacation, but not in Eights Week, as if teas and the river wasnt enough. If you ask me, sir, its all on account of the war. It couldnt have happened but for tha

20、t. For this was 1923 and for Lunt, as for thousands of others, things could never be the same as they had been in 1914. Now wine in the evening, he continued, as was his habit half in and half out of the door Cor one or two gentlemen to luncheon, theres reason in. But not dancing. It all came in wit

21、h the men back from the war. They were too old and they didnt know and they wouldnt learn. Thats the truth. And theres some even goes dancing with the town at the Masonic - but the proctors will get them, you see . . . Well, heres Lord Sebastian. I mustnt stand here talking when theres pin-cushions

22、to get.Sebastian entered - dove-grey flannel, white crepe de Chine, a Charvet tie, my tie as it happened, a pattern of postage stamps Charles - what in the worlds happening at your college? Is there a circus? Ive seen everything except elephants. I must say the whole of Oxford has become most peculi

23、ar suddenly. Last night it was pullulating with women. Youre to come away at once, out of danger. Ive got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Chateau Peyraguey - which isnt a wine youve ever tasted, so dont pretend. Its heaven with strawberries.Where are we going?To see a friend

24、.Who?Name of Hawkins. Bring some money in case we see anything we want to buy. The motor-car is the property of a man called Hardcastle. Return the bits to him if I kill myself; Im not very good at driving.Beyond the gate, beyond the winter garden that was once the lodge, stood an open two-seater Mo

25、rris-Cowley. Sebastians teddy bear sat at the wheel. We put him, between us - Take care hes not sick -and drove off. The bells of St Marys were chiming nine; we escaped collision with a clergyman, blackstraw-hatted, white-bearded) pedalling quietly down the wrong side of the High Street, crossed Car

26、fax, passed the station, and were soon in open country on the Botley Road; open country was easily reached in those days.(Isnt it early? said Sebastian. The women are still doing whatever women do to themselves before they come downstairs. Sloth has undone them. Were away. God bless Hardcastle.Whoev

27、er he may be.He thought he was coming with us. Sloth, undid him too. Well, I did tell him ten. Hes a very gloomy man in my college. He leads a double life. At least I assume he does. He couldnt go on being Hardcastle, day and night, always, could he? - or hed die of it. He says he knows my father, w

28、hich is impossible. Why?No one knows papa. Hes a social leper. Hadnt you heard?Its a pity neither of us can sing, I said. At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned

29、the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine - as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together - and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian

30、s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco, merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet golden wine seemed to lift us a fingers brea

31、dth above the turf and hold us suspended. Just the place to bury a crock of gold, said Sebastian. I should like to bury something precious in every place where Ive been happy and then when I was old and ugly and miserable, -I could come back and dig it up and remember.This was my third term since ma

32、triculation, but I date my Oxford life from my first meeting with Sebastian, which had happened, by chance, in the middle of the term before. We were in different colleges and came from different schools; I might well have spent my three or four years in the University and never have met him, but fo

33、r the chance of his getting drunk one evening in my college and of my having ground-floor rooms in .the front quadrangle.I had been warned against the dangers of these rooms by my cousin Jasper, who alone, when I first came up, thought me a suitable subject for detailed guidance. My father offered m

34、e none. Then, as always, he eschewed serious conversation with me. It was not until I was within a fortnight of going up that he mentioned the subject at all; then he said, shyly and rather slyly: Ive been- talking about you. I met -your future Warden at the Athenaeum. I wanted to talk about Etrusca

35、n notions of immortality; he wanted to talk about extension lectures for the working-class; so we compromised and talked about you. I asked him what your allowance should be. He said, “Three hundred a year; on no account give him more; thats all most men have.” I thought that a deplorable answer. I

36、had more than most men when I was up, and my recollection is that nowhere else in the world and at no other time, do a few hundred pounds, one way or the other, makee so much difference to ones importance, and popularity. I toyed with the idea of giving you six hundred, said my father, snuffling a l

37、ittle, as he did when he was amused, but I reflected that, should the Warden come to hear of it, it might sound deliberately impolite. So I shall e you five hundred and fifty. I thanked him.Yes, its indulgent of me, but it all comes out of capital, you know. I suppose this is the time I should give

38、you advice. I never had any myself except once from your cousin Alfred. Do you know, in the summer before I was going up, your cousin Alfred rode over to Boughton especially to give me a piece of advice? And do you know what the advice was? “Ned,” he said, “theres one thing I must beg of you. Always

39、 wear a tall hat on Sundays during term. It is by that, more than anything, that a man is judged.” And do you know, continued my father, snuffling deeply, I always did? Some men did, some didnt. I never saw any difference between them or heard it commented on, but I always wore mine. It only shows w

40、hat effect judicious advice can have, properly delivered at the right moment. I wish I had some for you, but I havent.My cousin Jasper made good the loss; he was the son of my fathers elder brother, to whom he referred more than once, only half facetiously, as the Head of the Family; he was in his f

41、ourth year and, the term before, had come within appreciable distance of getting his rowing blue; he was secretary of the Canning and president of the J.C.R.; a considerable person in college. He called on me formally during my first week and stayed to tea; he ate a very heavy meal of honey-buns, an

42、chovy toast, and Fullers walnut cake, then he lit his pipe and, lying back in the basketchair, laid down the rules of conduct which I should follow; he covered most subjects; even today I could repeat much of what he said, word for, word. .Youre reading History? A perfectly respectable school. The v

43、ery worst is English literature and the next worst is Modern Greats. You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything between. Time spent on a good second is time thrown away. You should go to the best lectures Arkwright on Demosthenes for instance - irrespective of whether they ar

44、e in your school or not.Clothes. Dress as you do in a country house. Never wear a tweed coat and flannel trousers - always a suit. And go to a London tailor; you get better cut and longer credit.Clubs. Join the Carlton now and the Grid at the beginning of your second year. If you want to run for the

45、 Union - and its not a bad thing to do - make your reputation outside first, at the Canning or the Chatham, and begin by speaking on the paper.Keep clear of Boars Hill. The sky over the opposing gables glowed and then darkened; I put more coal on the fire and turned on the light, revealing in their

46、respectability his London-made plus-fours and his Leander tie.Dont treat dons like schoolmasters; treat them as you would the vicar at home.Youll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first.Beware of the Anglo-Catholics - theyre all sodomites with

47、unpleasant accents. In fact, steer clear of all the religious groups; they do nothing but harm. Finally, just as he was going, he said, One last point. Change your rooms - They were large, with deeply recessed windows and painted, eighteenth-century panelling; I was lucky as a freshman to get them.

48、Ive seen many a man ruined through having ground-floor rooms in the front quad, said my cousin with deep gravity. People start dropping in. They leave their, gowns here and come and collect them before hall; you start giving them a sherry. Before you know where you are, youve opened a free bar for a

49、ll the undesirables of the college.I do not know that I ever, consciously, followed any of this advice. I certainly never changed my rooms - there were gillyflowers growing below the windows which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance.It is easy, retrospectively, to endow ones youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking ones stature on