Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Brideshead Revisited (1)

“This novel,” Evelyn Waugh said about Brideshead Revisited, “lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into the unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers.” It’s not difficult to understand the novel’s abiding popularity: nostalgia for a vanished era, deep sentimentality, saccharine romance among aristocratic types — many of the ingredients of the contemporary best-seller. It’s Waugh’s best-known book, but in many respects it’s his worst, and problems arise when it’s seen in the context of his work as a whole. How could Evelyn Waugh, one of the great English novelists of this century, write this sort of rubbish?

The languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life.

How also could he construct such a broken-backed plot; labour so clumsily with the techniques of first-person narration; abandon an excellent leading character for one of the most lifeless heroines in modern fiction?

Waugh himself, when he came to revise the book in 1959, was not unaware of its deficiencies, and the preface he wrote for the new edition represents an unmistakable demotion. The Magnum Opus, as it was known in the writing, becomes just a souvenir of the Second World War. But Brideshead Revisited can’t be dismissed as an aberration. It’s too large a book and its central position in Waugh’s career means it can’t be ignored.

Waugh’s novels divide themselves fairly neatly into two groups. On the one hand there are the comedies — with their naive or roguish protagonists — such as Decline and Fall, Scoop, Black Mischief and The Loved One. On the other are A Handful of Dust, Work Suspended, Brideshead Revisited, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and The Sword of Honour trilogy. It’s on this last category of novels that Waugh’s status as a major novelist rests. They all contain examples of his comic genius but they are supplemented by an element which is best, though simply, described as autobiographical.

Waugh drew heavily on events in his own life to furnish himself with the necessary raw material for his fiction. In almost all his novels, even the most outrageously comic, this transposition can be detected with little effort — a procedure considerably aided by the publication of his letters and diaries. The egregious Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall is a faithful portrait of a master at the prep school where Waugh taught. The bizarre evangelist Mrs Melrose Ape in Vile Bodies is Amy Semple McPherson. Scoop is a thinly fictionalized version of his travel book Remote People. Most famously, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a case history of his own paranoia. And so on. The image of Waugh as a beleaguered Tory squire tends to obscure the modernity of his fictional approach. In almost all cases the fiction remains very close to the source.

This is not to deprecate Waugh’s genuine imagination or great talent. All novelists — all realistic novelists — make the same transference, but some rely on it more heavily than others. In Waugh’s case, it seems to me, there is less pure invention than we might normally have supposed. The kind of world he described in his fiction wasn’t one he had to experience imaginatively: its elements lay dispersed all around him.

If this premise is acceptable it allows a more precise idea of the kind of novelist Waugh was (he is not like Dickens, for example) and it also makes a reading of Brideshead Revisited a little easier to achieve.

To summarize as briefly as possible, the novel consists of a sustained recollection on the part of the narrator, Captain Charles Ryder. It opens during the Second World War. Charles’s battalion is billeted in the grounds of Brideshead Castle and his arrival there prompts a long reconsideration of the relationships he enjoyed with its one-time occupants — the aristocratic, Catholic Flyte family — during the 1920s.

At Oxford Charles meets and is taken up by the dreamily eccentric Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the family. Charles is soon introduced to its other members and spends increasing amounts of his time at Brideshead. He is utterly captivated both by Sebastian and by the house itself. But, as Charles is drawn closer into the family, he and Sebastian drift apart. Sebastian evolves into a self-destructive alcoholic, finds life at home impossible and moves abroad.

Some years later, Charles — now a successful artist — meets Sebastian’s sister Julia again while on a transatlantic liner. They soon become lovers and plan to marry. This course of action is impeded because they both have to divorce their respective partners and also because of the return to England of Julia’s father Lord Marchmain. Lord Marchmain had scandalized society by openly taking a mistress and had abandoned his wife, family and religion to live abroad in self-imposed exile. He returns home to die, still a resolute apostate. The climax of the novel is a death-bed scene where, at the very last moment, Lord Marchmain acknowledges his faith. This gesture compels Julia to remain true to hers also, and she refuses to live with or marry Charles — even though Lord Marchmain had altered his will to leave Brideshead to them both. Charles accepts her decision and they part for ever.

The novel’s epilogue sees Charles wandering through the deserted and decrepit Brideshead contemplating the past. He is a sad and melancholy man but the experience has provided him with a faith of his own and, it’s strongly implied, he has converted to Catholicism.

The novel, Waugh said in a letter to Nancy Mitford, “is all about God.” This is only part of the truth. The events in Waugh’s life which made an appearance in his fiction were treated with an unremitting honesty, as Gilbert Pinfold makes abundantly clear. This is also true of the theme of betrayal and the faithless wife in A Handful of Dust, and his experience of war in the excellent and often underrated Sword of Honour. Brideshead belongs to this line of Waugh’s fiction but it’s the one book where the area of personal revelation and exploration is obscured by the unsatisfactory “story” surrounding it. The lingering over meals and wine, the implausible destinies of most of the characters, the meandering sprawl of the narrative are distractions and obfuscations. Beneath this Waugh’s real intentions can with some effort be made out. To put it crudely, Brideshead Revisited is not, as he would have it, about “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely related characters”; it’s about, first, the nature of a love that can exist between two young men and, second, the particular character of Waugh’s own religious faith.

The first part of Brideshead Revisited is an evocation of Oxford in the twenties and of a class of friendship which would now be recognized as homosexual. Waugh clouds the issue but the homosexual references are so numerous that only a wilful stubbornness could ignore their implication. When Charles’s relationship with Sebastian ends, the love interest is sustained in the person of Julia. However, although her similarity to Sebastian is continually stressed, the description of Charles’s love affair with her is almost wholly lifeless. It’s the character of Sebastian which attracts our interest, but his exit from the novel is clumsily abrupt and his ultimate fate — as a tame drunk in a monastery somewhere — is a feeble stab at plausibility.

After the Sebastian-Charles relationship the second theme of the novel engages Waugh’s remaining serious attention. As the family prepares for Lord Marchmain’s death, Charles systematically attacks, with devastating rationality, the tenets of the Catholic faith. To the agnostic or atheist reader — perhaps to the non-Catholic reader — everything about the book’s conclusion is maddeningly unsatisfying. And Waugh encourages this reaction with grim perversity. The reader is cajoled into condemning the Flyte family’s destructive faith. We cannot understand and must deplore Lord Marchmain’s death-bed recantation. We find it impossible to comprehend the reasons why Julia rejects Charles and we earnestly hope Charles will curse her for an ignorant fool. Finally, it becomes inconceivable that — at the novel’s end — Charles too should adopt their faith. But Waugh has no wish to provide a comforting or remotely rational explanation for his faith. It does not partake of reason or logic. Its sustaining power would be of no account if it did. It functions, for him at least, as the most severe and uncompromising of challenges, and it’s this aspect that Waugh so ruthlessly illustrates in the final pages.

This disharmony between the two themes of the novel and much of the narrative which is meant to reveal them may be one way of explaining the many dissatisfactions arising from this curious novel. Essentially it comes down to this: Waugh fudges the issue on the first theme and takes up the second halfway through the book, encumbered by having to work through a narrative in which he has only a superficial interest.

A television adaptation, I surmised, might seize the opportunity of focusing the emphasis on these subtextual obsessions. To a very limited extent this has been attempted.

I’ve seen the first five episodes — six hours — of Granada’s forthcoming adaptation of the novel. It is scrupulously faithful to the original. John Mortimer’s script uses Waugh’s own dialogue and vocabulary at every opportunity. Even the “feel” of the novel has been maintained through the extensive use of voiceover narration.

These episodes cover the relationship between Charles and Sebastian and take in their Oxford careers, a visit to Lord Marchmain in Venice, and several holidays at Brideshead. One of the defects of the novel, and where television actually improves on the original, is in the character of Charles. In the book his personality is — frankly — dull and boring. It’s hard to imagine why someone as intriguing as Sebastian should want to have anything to do with him. On film we have Jeremy Irons as Charles, fleshing out the “I” figure admirably. At least we can see why Sebastian and the preening aesthete Anthony Blanche (excellently rendered by Nicholas Grace) should be fascinated: simply he’s good-looking and they clearly fancy him. This implication is more heavily emphasized than in the novel but doesn’t move much beyond this. Sebastian puts his arms round Charles’s shoulders but otherwise their affection remains chaste. (Mortimer does get Charles on some occasions to light his cigarette from Sebastian’s. A code?)

This policy decision to follow the book at all costs is commendable (it extends to set decorations, costumes, even — with one important exception — hairstyles) though I should imagine it’s going to be progressively hard to maintain in the second half. However, it does mean that the faults of the book are carried over to the film. Certain explanations are not forthcoming — notably in the case of Sebastian’s self-loathing and his mysterious shame “of being unhappy.” A charge of tedium is sure to be levelled, as it can be at the book. A lot more could have been cut with little damage, and, as it is, it’s going to have to be spread fairly thin to cover twelve hours of viewing time.

There is one slip-up, though, which seems, in the midst of so much attention to detail, curious. In the novel both Sebastian and Julia are dark. Their extreme likeness to one another is regularly referred to — a fact which is intended to make Julia an obvious Sebastian surrogate. But in the series Sebastian (Anthony Andrews) is blond and Julia (Diana Quick) is dark. Why, I wonder. It seems a stupid oversight.

Otherwise one can only applaud. The acting is of a uniformly high standard. Anthony Andrews gives the performance of his life as Sebastian, the locations — Oxford, Venice, Castle Howard — are superb, and there’s a classic John Gielgud cameo as Charles’s eccentric father. The first episode is being shown on Monday 12 October. Despite all the problems, well worth watching.

1981