EVELYN WAUGH, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED: “THE SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES OF CAPTAIN CHARLES RYDER”.
I had the privilege of being in London at the time of the first screening. It seemed as if the whole country was swimming across gentle, lukewarm waves of nostalgia and aesthetic enjoyment, lamenting the gone age of British splendour and dominance, mesmerised by the complex emotional imbroglios of a hugely-rich aristocratic Roman-Catholic family, into which the narrator in the novel (and in the film…), the atheist (or at least agnostic…) Charles Ryder gets accepted, and “adopted”, despite his agnosticism.
Winter of 1943. Charles Ryder’s battalion takes part in routine training and manoeuvres of the army in England. He will be reprimanded by his “Commanding Officer”, because of some untidiness in the barracks and surroundings.
He is going to unveil to us the “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder”, beginning in the winter of 1943. Ryder is a captain of the British army, being conveyed across the English countryside, fatigued by simulacrums of military action, exhaling a melancholic Weltschmerz, fearing that the new class of mercantile philistines, represented by Sargent Hooper, will soon take control of society and destroy beauty.
By then he had already become a successful painter– a status Evelyn Waugh secretly always wanted to achieve. Thus he will regale us with thunderstorms and drizzles of gigantic wall-frescoes, splendid oil-paintings and scintillating water-colours, capturing physical and human landscapes of a gone age, while he attempts to come to terms with his devastated personal life. And the seemingly elegant yet unstoppable meandering into self-destruction of a family which had everything to be insouciantly halcyon, everyone else’s envy notwithstanding.
Shortly after the last episode was broadcasted, I had to go to a hospital in London, to undergo minor surgery. They expected me to spend two nights in a huge hall, together with other patients. I remember the smile of a nurse who, after discovering the book I had in my bed, said loud to her colleagues: “Look! He is reading Brideshead Revisited”. It was my first encounter with Evelyn Waugh as a writer, which left me as enchanted and pensive, as moved and puzzled, as when I saw the last episode of the 1981 serial. His other novels followed later on, in particular Scoop (1938), which in 1988 almost threw me into jail in Hamburg, Germany. I was laughing uncontrollably while going through customs and police control at the airport; a zealous policeman though I was being overtly and consciously disrespectful to them. It ended with just a reprimand.
It would take decades for a thorough “revisitation”, which began in Berlin in the year 2014, including the first reading of A Handful of Dust (1934), part of his correspondence and essays.
Evelyn Waugh ingeniously constructed a novel which hooks the reader by a well-planned usage of “flash-back” and “flash-forward” techniques. We begin in 1943 (“prologue”), then go back to 1923, a “flash-forward” to the first visit of Brideshead, and again back to the beginning of Ryder’s sojourn at Oxford, until we retake the first “flash-forward”. The story resumes then linearly glued to Chronus, though there are several “flash-backs”, and one key “flash-forward”, to throw us again into the final years of the Second World War (“epilogue”).
And then, of course, there is Waugh’s prosa, at times reaching in this novel heights of such breathtaking beauty, such soul-stirring intensity, that the common adage, Waugh should be considered as one of the “great prose stylists of the English language” in the 20th century, ought to be modified by adding one or two previous centuries. For example, at the beginning:
“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mist, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer – 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.”1
Oxford, Anno 1923. An unexpected, and rather unpleasant incident, brings the undergraduates Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte, youngest son of the Marquis of Marchmain, for the first time together. They would soon become close friends, Charles being introduced to the group of aristocrats and eccentrics surrounding the ethereally handsome Sebastian, all of them engaged ad infinitum in using (or wasting) their time at Oxford “getting tight”, as Waugh himself would define his sojourn there in a noted interview with the BBC2.
Julia (Diana Quick) awaiting Charles, at the station nearest to Brideshead. 1981 serial.
Charles is then requested during the summer to go to Brideshead, as Sebastian had a “serious accident”. He would meet for the first time Julia Flyte, the oldest daughter of the Marquis of Marchmain. The two young men manage to get to Venice, to stay at a palazzo on the Grand Canal rented by the Marquis, who lives there with his Italian lover, Cara, whom the “Byronic” looking Englishman met during his service in the First World War. The friendship will continue back in Oxford, though the first dark clouds emerge over the horizon. Lady Marchmain, the ultra-protective mother, welcomes Charles Ryder as a suitable company for her son, yet the path towards self-destruction is not to be erased, in spite of numerous efforts.
"Ought we to get drunk every night?" - asks Charles Ryder.
Charles and Sebastian enjoying wine at Brideshead. Dialogue added by the screenwriters. 1981 serial.
Perhaps the shrewdest literary construct to appear out of Waugh’s prestidigitator’s hat, superbly amalgamated within the unfolding of the core of the novel, is that of introducing two “exotic outsiders” (albeit at the time of events very much “in”). They are two “unmistakable foreigners”, who are commanded to act as perspicacious, sharp-edged decoders of the “unmentionable” hidden, deep-sea currents in the ocean of feelings and secrets of the soul. Two souffleurs, who, although “whispering” to the other figures, are giving the readers the clues to unveil the concealed maelstrom leading to self-destruction and emotional disaster.
The first one is Anthony Blanche, the exotic “world-citizen”:
“You must remember I am not English you know. I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals...”3
First appearance is almost a shock to Charles Ryder:
“He had on a smooth chocolate brown suit with loud white strips, suede shoes, a large bow-tie and he drew off yellow wash-leather gloves as he came into the room, part Gallic, part Yankee part, perhaps, Jew; wholly exotic.”4...”the aesthete par excellence, a byword of iniquity, from Cherwell Edge to Summerville.”5
"You don't know Charles Ryder..."-says Sebastian. "No, but I have the most delicious feeling I am going to...", says Anthony Blanche (Nickolas Grace), 1981 serial. Dialogue added by the screenwriters.
Anthony Blanche keeps bouncing between Argentina, France and England, likes to pose as a homosexual, befriended by Jean Cocteau and André Gide. Albeit he is rather keener on appearing as a mannered flamboyant aesthete and haughty provocateur, whose penetrating eyes were tantamount to x-rays, seeking without the slightest compassion the recondite layers of the most innermost of those unfortunate enough to stumble upon him. Perhaps the figure who most exults with Schadenfreude, when stumbling onto personages getting drown in the whirlpool of emotional malheurs and personal limitations.
In a long conversation with Charles Ryder, drink after drink, he would throw his diagnosis of the “Marchmain family” onto the perplexed Charles:
-“Sebastian has charm, but no brain”,
- His brother (Brideshead) “...something archaic, out of a cave that’s been sealed for centuries. He has the face as though an Aztec sculptor had attempted a portrait of Sebastian; he is a learned bigot, a ceremonious barbarian, a snow-bound lama…”
-”And then Julia… a face of flawless Florentine quattrocento beauty...all she wants is power…”
-“There is another sister (Cordelia), too, I believe in the schoolroom. Nothing is known of her except that her governess went mad and drowned herself not long ago. I am sure she’s abominable”.
- (Lady Marchmain) “… she meanwhile keeps of small gang of enslaved and emaciated prisoners for her exclusive enjoyment. She sucks their blood. You can see the tooth marks all over...They never escape once she’s had her teeth into them. It is witchcraft. There is no other explanation.”6
“-I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin.”7says Cara (Stephane Audran). 1981 serial. On Sebastian: “-Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.”8
A question mark has been raised from the publication of the novel, and still hangs around: That of the true nature of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian, that “romantic friendship”, and whether it has a more concrete sexual connotation. Waugh himself was quite clear, placing that friendship in a rather airy sphere:
"Charles's romantic affection for Sebastian is part due to the glitter of the new world Sebastian represents, part to the protective feeling of a strong towards a weak character, and part a foreshadowing of the love for Julia which is to be the consuming passion of his mature years."12
Sex plays almost no role in the whole novel, although metaphors and allusions abound. It appears only once as a possibility, at the first encounter between Charles and Julia, “I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me”13, and brief hints towards the act itself being enacted appear very late, in the ship bringing Charles, his wife, and Julia, from New York to England. The links between Charles and Sebastian are better placed in that other world conceived by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wahlverwandschaft, usually (and not-quite-correctly) translated as “elective affinities”. It is a spiritually (in the German sense of geistig, not geistlich) being together, chosen not by primaeval blood, or by attraction to flesh, but by the inner will of the soul. The two young men live for a long time in sand-castles and air-balloons. Hence the harshness of the awakening, due to arrive sooner or later.
Politically “incorrect”
Evelyn Waugh would nowadays be tagged as a very much “politically incorrect” writer, and not only because of the novels which deal with Africa (Scoop, 1938 and Black Mischief, 1932). He never did eschew controversy, persisted on being iconoclast, irreverent, using satire and all the scales of humour to capture his epoch. Conservative, traditionalist, a converted and vociferous Catholic, he was disparaged for being out of touch with the Zeitgeist. He answered to the latter onslaught that he certainly wished he had been born some centuries earlier.
Lady Marchmain (Claire Boom) reading a story by G.K. Chesterton, “The Queer Feet”, to the family (plus Charles Ryder) assembled at Brideshead, whilst Sebastian gets drunk – again. The moral of that short-story will appear later, in a conversation in London, between Charles and Cordelia, after the death of Lady Marchmain.
Brideshead Revisited has been debunked, and “written-down”, by some as:
“A hedonistic portrayal of aristocratic purveyors and seekers of leisure, escorted by bourgeois arrivists, swimming in a sea of by-gone belle époque, exhibiting elegant decadence as ennui supérieur and extracurricular relationships as a mark of distinction, of a seducing yet bound-to-disappear uniqueness, swallowed by the relentless dynamics of capitalism, et cetera, et cetera...”
That is how the author signing these lines would summarise the objections, and perhaps at times also the dégout, coming above all from the non-conservative milieus.
Nota bene: Such a depiction may have more to do with the 1981 serial than with the novel as such. Waugh himself confessed that the emphasis on gluttony and wines, and champagne, in the novel, had to do with the privations endured during the Second World War. The film-version, which does not sully the original text (quite the contrary), may however give the impression, in particular to those who had not read the novel as such, of an excessive display of insouciant leisure by the very-well-to-do, and of a feverish aestheticism. No one ever seems to dress gauchely in the film, not even the members of the working-class.
Such a socially-aware appraisal of the novel would be considered as not quite compatible with the definition of its theme by the author himself as:
“the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters...”14
This is indeed a Catholic novel, and it has a theological theme‒at least one. Waugh himself hinted at the last dialogue between Cordelia and Charles, and the reference to a passage from the Father Brown detective story "The Queer Feet“, by K.G. Chesterton":
„I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.[7]15
Yet even those who despair at Waugh’s “incorrectness”, and at what they call “old-fashioned” aesthetic values, cannot fail to be at least slightly subjugated by a prose which, no forced orfèvrerie at all, carries a magic of its own, unfolding clouds of soothing incense, embracing us, promising us a red-wine, like the Burgundy eulogised in page 163, which will regenerate our hearts:
“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.Those memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons at St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in a little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their neck, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until suddenly the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time.”16
An artistry which gets enhanced by the unforced introduction of those
minuscule pleasures of daily life, crowning the candour of a
young-lady, and counterpointing the serendipity and arrogance of an
agnostic artist who elevates himself above the other mortals, as when
Cordelia explains to Charles her possible vocation to become a nun,
and says:
-...But I don’t know now. Everything has changed so much suddenly.”
But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon. I had had my fingers in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening – of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.
“You’ll fall in love”, I said.
“Oh, pray no. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?”17
A crucial question: Where did all that malheur come from? Where and how did all those dislikes and hatreds arise, all that intra-family turmoil, all those disaffections? Perhaps the desire to control the other one, the seeking of brutish (emotionally) power over the nearest-ones as the raison d'être, a luxurious indifference to the ways-and-means of ordinary life. It seems as if almost everyone chooses the wrong partner, the inadequate spouse. Every single marriage collapses. Even second attempts. Julia will marry a Canadian-born adventurer and truculent money-seeker, who is discovered–too late–to have been already married once, hence divorced, and hence also forced to conduct the religious ceremony almost on the sly, in a modest Anglican chapel. When she meets Charles on the ship leaving New York, years afterwards, she is a total wrack‒just about half-camouflaged.
1981 serial -You
have changed, Charles. So lean and grim, not at all the pretty boy
Sebastian brought home with him. Harder too.-
And you are softer.- Yes, I think so… and very patient now.-And sadder too.-Oh yes, much sadder.”19 1
The eldest son of the Marquis of Marchmain, Lord Brideshead, will marry a middle-aged widow with children, and it appears also past breeding-age, to the utter disgust of his father, who thus proceed to disinherit him, depriving him of the possession of the Brideshead castle, which is given to Julia.
Is it just the erosion produced by a life of leisure, breeding boredom, deviant conducts, and a blasé Weltgleichgültigkeit (world-indifference), as a sign of distinction, and separation from the “lower” classes?
On top of the role played by the two “sophisticated foreigners” (Anthony and Cara), the atmosphere at home becomes certainly unbreathable. Charles Ryder abandons the study of history at Oxford, to become a painter and thus goes to Paris. The Marquis of Marchmain never comes back from the war, “exiles” himself in Venice, with his lover, and only returns to England because a new war is approaching. Sebastian Flyte would choose Morocco as the “real” home and site of seclusion, as well as new drinking-hole. The now matured painter Charles Ryder extricates himself from a doomed marriage and an adulterous wife by going to Mexico and Central America, to find a “new light”, and, finally, his own approach to painting. Cordelia go to Spain during the Civil War, to nurse wounded combatants, on the “national side”, we assume, and will stay in that country after the military conflagration ended. “Epilogue”, early 1940s, Julia and Cordelia go to Palestine, to contribute “their part”.
Was it then that difficult to be a happy English citizen in England?
I happen to believe that this novel has not yet distilled all its wisdom, all its secrets. That they were hidden ex professo in the text, left there to await the passage of time, time alone will be asked to decode them. Perhaps a new reading, decades henceforth, will accomplish that task.
The former agnostic Charles Ryder kneels down in the chapel of
Brideshead, at the end of the novel, adhering at last to Catholicism. Is that the
only way to survive and look forward, when one happens to stand upon
the ruins and ashes of a devastated personal life?1981 serial.
It has to do with the prevalence of the “Spirit” against “Matter”, the triumph of “Spirit” over “Flesh”:
“…a small red flame...burning anew among the old stones.”20
Graham Greene, shortly after the death of Evelyn Waugh, stated that the author of Brideshead Revisited was the:
“….greatest novelist of my generation…” 21
Had Evelyn Waugh survived Graham Greene, he would have said the same about his colleague and friend.
1Waugh,
Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited, Modern Classics, Penguin, (1945),
2000, p. 17.1981 television serial Granada-Television, ITV, directed by Charles Sturridge, Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
2“Face to Face” series conducted by John Freeman, 26 June 1960.
3P. 253.
4P. 27.
5Ibid.
6PP. 44-50.
7P. 93.
8P. 93.
9P. 92.
10P. 92.
11P. 95.
12Waugh, Evelyn. "Brideshead Revisited" (memorandum). 18 February 1947. Reprinted in: Forden, Giles. "Waugh versus Hollywood" (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/may/22/classics.film). The Guardian. 21 May 2004.
13P. 68.
14Preface, IX. 1959
15P. 206.
16P. 211.
17P. 208.
18P. 89.
19P. 223.
20P. 326.
21 Stannard, Martin (2011) [2004]. "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh (1903–06)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. Vol. II p. 492
