Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh, 1945 ★★★★★

Unorthodox Masterpiece

A novel that almost dares readers not to like it, Brideshead Revisited is almost an embarrassed first choice for many seasoned Waugh readers like me. It wallows in privilege and snobbish self-regard, featuring a protagonist who would be called a “stick” in the parlance of its time.

But for all that, this is also Waugh at his most accessible and enjoyable, pulling a Proust but managing to retain his reputation as ace humorist and satirist. After many comic novels, some more successful than others, this was his first story in an unambiguously Catholic vein.

Charles Ryder, an officer in the British Army in World War II, finds himself stationed at a base located at the now-abandoned estate house of his long-lost friend, Sebastian Flyte, and Sebastian’s noble family. Being back at Brideshead, as this manor is named, stirs Charles to remember what he had, what he lost, and what he carries with him.

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared above me one grey morning of war-time” explains Charles in his narration. Memory is a key theme of the book, Charles looking back sequentially on his experiences with Sebastian and his family.

In the 1920s, sprawling British estates like this one, Trentham Hall, were still occupied by their original families. Brideshead is the ancestral home of Lord Marchmain, once a proud Catholic, now an angry apostate. Over time, Brideshead falls into desolation and ruin, a symbol of its family's quiet decline.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_country_houses_in_20th-century_Britain

In each book, a different member of the family is spotlighted: Sebastian in the first book, a very fond reverie of Oxford days enjoyed in summery splendor; Sebastian’s mother Lady Marchmain in the second, a tough religious noblewoman abandoned by her husband; then Julia, Sebastian’s sister, in the third, for a time Charles’s lover.

If you recall later TV or film treatments and thought Sebastian was Charles’s romantic interest, you may be correct. Waugh hints at but doesn’t actually reveal a brief homosexual partnership there. Otherwise the book does not skimp on detail. Brideshead drowns you with a wealth of tactile information:

I could tell him that all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mixed with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year end, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.

Perhaps reflecting some of the author's discomfort, the novel's subtitle when published in 1945 was "The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder." This distances the author from subject while reminding readers Ryder (like Waugh) was currently serving his country.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brideshead_Revisited

This descriptive richness came to embarrass its author. During the war, and for a time after in a period of national austerity, Waugh came under fire for luxuriating too much in his memories of upper-class life in 1920s exurbia. In a 1959 preface to this novel, he uncharacteristically agrees with this criticism, excusing Brideshead as “a panegyric preached over an empty coffin” he found himself unable to bring up-to-date.

Of course what makes Brideshead such delicious reading now is precisely because it is so out-of-date, with its concerns for aristocratic refinement and religious salvation. Waugh’s older novels also present lost worlds of a kind, but few seem as happily adrift in them as this one.

Waugh may have felt more vulnerable with this book as his own youthful experiences were put on full display. It opens with Oxford as Waugh found it, or perhaps imagined finding it, as a young undergraduate, “a city of aquatint.”

In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s 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 cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.

A painting of Oxford's University College, circa 1920. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy," Sebastian tells Charles. "Then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."
Image from https://www.collectorsprints.com/9624/antiqueprint/universitycollegeoxford

Sebastian Flyte adds to the otherworldly sensation of this look back. A fellow undergraduate who introduces himself to Charles by vomiting in his dorm room, Sebastian is a creature of pure gossamer who carries with him a teddy bear and a self-perpetuating mystery.

At this point in the novel Sebastian is the only member of his family Charles knows. “If they once got hold of you with their charm, they’d make you their friend not mine, and I won’t let them,” he says.

Whether Sebastian is Charles’s lover is something Waugh seems to lean toward without stating. Among Sebastian’s other friends is the thoroughly out Anthony Blanche, who comes on strong recounting an encounter with homophobic Oxfordians:

“Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me.”

But probing the gay angle alone leaves out at least two-thirds of the book. In fact, Sebastian himself may be the least interesting member of the Marchmain clan, becoming a hopeless alcoholic and disappearing completely from the narrative halfway in. If you are like me and came of age at the time of the 1981 Granada miniseries, you associate Brideshead with straw boaters, gillyflowers, and Aloysius the teddy bear, but the book moves on from all that rather fast.

A side trip to Venice to meet Lord Marchmain becomes an idyll within an idyll: "The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly - perhaps too sweetly," Charles recalls. "I was drowning in honey, stingless." Above, a view of the Grand Canal much like Charles enjoys in the novel.
Image from https://www.allposters.com/-sp/1920s-1930s-Grand-Canal-from-Rialto-Bridge-Venice-Italy-Posters_i15548054_.htm

What makes the book out of date today more than anything else is the Catholic angle, specific to its status as minority culture in Protestant England in the first half of the 20^th century. Lady Marchmain is its principal exponent, seeing Charles as a worthwhile addition to her faith. Charles is seduced to an extent (the three parts of the book may be likened to three seductions of Charles, by Sebastian, then his mother and sister) but aware of snares, too.

Waugh’s magnificence is not limited to the way he spins webs from out of the past; he is also brilliant at suddenly blowing them away and creating something different but just as absorbing in their place.

Humor is a useful tool for this. In the second part, we see Julia’s fiancé Rex Mottram, a Canadian of decidedly utilitarian mind, try to bluff his way to a Catholic conversion and being gulled by Julia’s sister Cordelia into accepting assorted made-up bizarreries, like pointing his feet a certain way when he sleeps.

A priest given charge of Rex’s conversion explains the challenge:

“Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said it’s going to rain would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, ‘I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’”

Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, Anthony Andrews as Sebastian, and Diana Quick as Julia in the 1981 ITV miniseries. A trans-Atlantic sensation on its release, popular memory of it seems fixed in the first third of the story, before Sebastian goes to pieces and Charles and Julia engage in a messy romance.
Image from https://www.frieze.com/article/forty-years-itv-brideshead-revisited

The third part, centered on Julia, is probably the least successful for non-religious readers. It is here Waugh is most invested in bringing a moral to his story. Amusements subside, replaced by ruminations of Final Things and sin. For Catholic readers, this is the money part, where Waugh lets go of mortal trappings to direct the gaze Heavenwards. For them, and maybe them alone, Brideshead’s resolutions satisfy.

Still, a great book. Waugh’s masterpiece, perhaps, though a case can also be made for the starker simplicity of A Handful Of Dust. Both are concerned with marital infidelity, though in Brideshead Charles is at least in part a culprit and not only a victim.

Charles may be the novel’s biggest mystery. We see everything unfold from his eyes, which makes him inherently sympathetic. Yet we also see him as a poor husband, a neglectful father, and a diffident friend. His attitude with Lady Marchmain is formal and guarded, yet later in the book he quietly adopts her faith. From the little we see of him in wartime, he seems a bad officer, too.

This somewhat conforms with the popular image of Waugh’s own personality: stiff, unaffectionate, and unyielding. Charles is even depicted as an artist, though a pictorial one, not a writer like Waugh. If there is a distance in the novel between creator and creation, it is in the degree of reluctance with which Charles takes up his faith. That conversion is not even depicted within the narrative; there are only hints here and there.

Waugh at 41 was given time off from military service to write what he felt certain at the time would be his greatest novel. He was not as sure when it was published in 1945, but Brideshead Revisited is widely viewed as his most successful and most famous work.
Image from https://awritersden.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/the-decline-and-fall-of-evelyn-waugh/

What also makes Brideshead great is the lapidary eloquence you get in the many sidetrips Waugh takes, like a night of fine dining with Charles and Rex: “The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed, separating each glaucous bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.”

Or in the uniquely unsentimental way love-interest Julia is described:

She was thin in those days, flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs and neck, bodiless, spidery; thus far she conformed to the fashion, but the hair-cut and the hats of the period, and the blank stare and gape of the period, and the clownish dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones, could not reduce her to type.

For all his craft in other novels, you get a sense it all came together here in a remarkable way. Waugh paints a detailed and celebratory portrait of the good life, of picnicking on strawberries and white wine in secluded bowers, trysts on cruise ships, and life lived amid museum-caliber splendor, yet at the same time presents a compelling argument for Catholic austerity and discipline in seeking life’s higher purpose.

Waugh wrote other novels after this one; collectively, the “Sword Of Honour” trilogy may be rated as high. But few books deliver a completely different set of pleasures every time you read them. Brideshead Revisited has flaws, including a sex scene that reads like a property foreclosure, but Waugh’s rich sense of humor and his dexterity with language are things among many that keep this work evergreen.