This is the take on Saltburn I've been waiting for - and with a bonus excursion into Common People, one of the greatest texts in 20th century pop music. Fun fact: a friend went to art school with the photographer who ended up shooting the Different Class album artwork and they ended up using his brother's wedding for the cover. https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/this-is-how-an-ordinary-wedding-photo-ended-up-on-the-cover
I've been flippantly referring to Saltburn as "trash Brideshead Revisited meets trash Talented Mr Ripley" and as someone who's only seen the Minghella adaptation, I'd be curious to hear if you have further thoughts on Tom Ripley as an antecedent or Highsmith more generally.
"Brideshead" is not a Catholic novel - that genre can't exist in a country where the True Church has already been put away from power, you have to look to France and Italy. Only the Irish write anything in that genre using English, and Joyce's original "Stephen Hero", if we had the complete finished text, might be the nearest best example.
Waugh's life and career intersected with the properly posh Henry Green, who was working on his own country house story "Loving" at the time BR was in gestation. I think the two of them swapped manuscripts to make comments; Jeremy Treglown described the results in his intro to the Harvill edition long ago. There was an ironic inverse relation between the 2: the proper posh Catholic uninterested in that world and wanting to explore working class lives instead (see also "Caught", his great Blitz novel).
One other artistic old posho who had a sensitivity for fakes and climbers was Wyndham Lewis. His "Vulgar Streak" has a counterfeit gent running a counterfeit money racket, and coming apart from the scheme unravels. Notable for a scene in which a foreign psychoanalyst opines that the English have no class system compared to the social hierarchy he was used to back in Vienna.
Faking paintings was also a profitable racket, and Lewis had that as a side hustle by some of the posh boys in his political novel "The Revenge For Love". Waugh alludes to "restoration" as a source of income for hard-up artists in "Work Suspended". That latter work was also perhaps anticipating the post-war erosion of class boundaries, with the character of Arthur Atwater, lower middle class creep, who we learn later did well for himself in the Army occupying Germany.
Huw! Yes! The Saltburn comment! Been waiting for this, thank you for your extraordinary writing.
This is the take on Saltburn I've been waiting for - and with a bonus excursion into Common People, one of the greatest texts in 20th century pop music. Fun fact: a friend went to art school with the photographer who ended up shooting the Different Class album artwork and they ended up using his brother's wedding for the cover. https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/this-is-how-an-ordinary-wedding-photo-ended-up-on-the-cover
I've been flippantly referring to Saltburn as "trash Brideshead Revisited meets trash Talented Mr Ripley" and as someone who's only seen the Minghella adaptation, I'd be curious to hear if you have further thoughts on Tom Ripley as an antecedent or Highsmith more generally.
I do adore your writing! As weird and fucked up as Britain is, I live overseas and I miss it and its subtleties.
This was possibly my favourite part though “They are cunts, utter, reckless, moronic cunts, to the last drop” 👌
This is a brilliant piece, even by your standards. Thank you.
By the way the Jacobin link to Owen Hatherley’s comment is broken.
"Brideshead" is not a Catholic novel - that genre can't exist in a country where the True Church has already been put away from power, you have to look to France and Italy. Only the Irish write anything in that genre using English, and Joyce's original "Stephen Hero", if we had the complete finished text, might be the nearest best example.
Waugh's life and career intersected with the properly posh Henry Green, who was working on his own country house story "Loving" at the time BR was in gestation. I think the two of them swapped manuscripts to make comments; Jeremy Treglown described the results in his intro to the Harvill edition long ago. There was an ironic inverse relation between the 2: the proper posh Catholic uninterested in that world and wanting to explore working class lives instead (see also "Caught", his great Blitz novel).
One other artistic old posho who had a sensitivity for fakes and climbers was Wyndham Lewis. His "Vulgar Streak" has a counterfeit gent running a counterfeit money racket, and coming apart from the scheme unravels. Notable for a scene in which a foreign psychoanalyst opines that the English have no class system compared to the social hierarchy he was used to back in Vienna.
Faking paintings was also a profitable racket, and Lewis had that as a side hustle by some of the posh boys in his political novel "The Revenge For Love". Waugh alludes to "restoration" as a source of income for hard-up artists in "Work Suspended". That latter work was also perhaps anticipating the post-war erosion of class boundaries, with the character of Arthur Atwater, lower middle class creep, who we learn later did well for himself in the Army occupying Germany.