
Madresfield Court, Malvern, Worcestershire
Scanned from the author's extensive collection of postcard views of stately homes
In the next issue of
Vanity Fair, the one after the Oscar issue with the young starlets on the cover, the one with Michael Douglas on the cover instead, there will be yet another story on the relationship of Evelyn Waugh's
Brideshead to the history of Madresfield and the Lygon family.
As you know, of course, I have already written extensively on Madresfield and
Brideshead, but apparently there is still more to be said. And not surprisingly, since as you will recall, William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, had "a persistent weakness for footmen" [
Source] which was inevitably bound to be noticed by his brother-in-law the fabulously wealthy and profoundly intolerant Duke of Westminster who
did say something, rather unpleasant, and scandal ensued. Since Waugh had taken up with the doomed second son, the young and delicate Hugh Lygon, the banished Earl became the inspiration for Lord Marchmain, the Lygons for the Flytes, Hugh for Sebastian, and so on and so on.
The intersection of fiction and fact is an endlessly fascinating place to pin down, to map, to go and seek out and stand at the corner of and look about in every direction for yet more clues. They say we are in a time when the memoir and reality are especially important, but I think we've all just gotten terribly skeptical. No one believes what passes for truth so everyone wants to reveal their own personal version, hence all these blogs, confessional and othewise, these tell-all tales, all fodder for Oprah's book club. The problem is that one can never tell the truth without embellishing (at any rate, I can't). How far one goes in one direction or the other, for the sake of truth or for the sake of a good story, depends on so many factors, not least being the desire to keep your audience entertained. I happen to think since man first started grunting, he was shaping true reporting into enhanced and compelling narrative ("
The wooly mammoth was how big? Really? Show us the little dance you did when you taunted him. Right before you killed him all by yourself with that little stick. Go on. Tell us again.").
It's in our nature. I don't know about you, but I can hardly get through the day without at some point re-imagining the scene around me, the various players, the setting, the dialogue re-composed into a new and improved reality. A funnier one, at least. And no, as a matter of fact my 'fictionalized' take is not
always the one in which I come off looking good. Sometimes quite the opposite.
You, on the other hand, invariably receive a flattering portrayal. I promise.
In
Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (London: Harper Press, 2009) the author Paula Byrne writes, "all Waugh’s fictional people and places are subtle transformations, not direct portrayals, of ‘reality’.” I should hope so. I should like to think fiction is more than the truth with the names changed. I should even like to believe that fiction does something the truth can't do. Something perhaps even better. I happen to believe there's a point to taking the raw material of this world and shaping it into something else, that there's even a useful purpose for not entirely telling the truth. But I'm old-fashioned. I love fiction. Fiction is, after all, not entirely true. Non-fiction is, by definition,
non-not-true. Yes I adore finding out what supposedly really happened, what was really going on. But I think sometimes fiction gets to the truth
behind the truth, the way non-fiction can get to the story behind the story. And yes, I know it sounds mad, trying to make the distinction. I know it is difficult, trying to tell the difference.