Brideshead Revisited, A Commentary
In Part 4 of Dr. White’s lecture on Brideshead Revisited, he gives an overview of the novel, presenting its major themes, plot structure, and characters.
Part 4
What did Waugh mean when he said Brideshead Revisited was a book about God? The first edition which appeared in England carried a warning on its dust-jacket that did not appear on the American versions. Waugh was aware that he was presenting to the public something different than what they had come to expect from him. Hence, the warning said:
When I wrote my first novel, sixteen years ago, my publishers advised me, and I readily agreed, to prefix the warning that it was ‘meant to be funny.’ Now, in a more somber decade, I must provide them with another text, and, in honesty to the patrons who have supported me hitherto, state that Brideshead Revisited is not meant to be funny. There are passages of buffoonery, but the general theme is at once romantic and eschatological.
It is ambitious, perhaps intolerably presumptuous; nothing less than an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family, half-paganized themselves, in the world of 1923-39. The story will be uncongenial alike to those who look back on that pagan world with unalloyed affection, and to those who see it as transitory, insignificant and, already, hopefully passed. Whom then can I hope to please? Perhaps those who have the leisure to read a book word by word for the interest of the writer’s use of language, perhaps those who look to the future with black forebodings and need more solid comfort than rosy memories. For the latter I have given my hero, and them, if they will allow me, a hope, not indeed, that anything but disaster lies ahead, but that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters.
The last line is especially magnificent. But how do you write a book about God? It presents an artistic problem. Waugh is writing about grace in the world. To do this, he designs a novel in which he tries to chronicle the presence of God, and His operations through grace, indirectly, by showing the impact of that grace on the lives of human beings. It is obviously not possible to show that grace directly, although we see many characters moved by grace. The whole novel builds to the great deathbed scene and the final moment of grace for Lord Marchmain.
But we see this impact operating in one way or another: it is either accepted or rejected by the characters. Some are dragged, kicking and screaming against their will, by God’s grace, to a good end. Others simply acknowledge God’s grace all along and move quite comfortably to the end.
The book may be easily misunderstood. If the novel has a starting point and an ending point, and if the ending point shows a character or many characters finally accepting God’s grace and acting on it, then the novel must begin by presenting characters devoid of or rejecting grace. Waugh chooses to begin the world of the novel as a place in which it is difficult to find God’s grace, a world filled with many characters who quite clearly, from the start, are without grace.
I bring this up because there are things in the novel which disturb many readers. It is a novel filled with sin. There is no getting around it. I suspect you can find all seven of the deadly sins in it somewhere, some more prominent than others. The author is not reveling in sin. In some of the most disturbing or extreme moments, Waugh presents these sins in the way a great artist does: slightly removed with a deliberate style that makes it almost possible to overlook them completely if you do not understand what is going on.
If you are writing a novel about the modern world, how can you present the characters as other than gravely sinful? This is the world Waugh knew, a world that he said had rejected God, or, as he wrote to his brother at one point, a world that “needs more religion.” By that he meant the Faith, not some generic religion. If the world does not have the true Faith or rejects the true Faith, then the world will be composed of gravely sinning characters.
It would be entirely possible to take these same materials, in the hands of a bad novelist, and make an extraordinarily bad novel. Particularly in our day and age, you can imagine what an inartistic or tasteless writer could do with this same material. Waugh in the past was quite ready to shock an audience. He does not try to shock in this novel. He is reflecting hard truths.
One of the duties of the artist is to hold a mirror up to nature. The artist must reflect the reality of the time and age in which he lives and which he knows. Those realities are his basic materials. Rare is the writer who can create elaborate fantasy and make it believable. But even in most fantasies, you find the basic ideas rooted in a particular age.
It is necessary to touch on these unpleasant things in order to have a pilgrimage out of the modern world, out of the enslavement of sin, towards the moment when God’s grace acts on these lives. Let me quote Waugh again: “Many modern novelists, since and including James Joyce, attempt to represent the whole human mind and soul, and yet omit its determining character: that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose.”
Waugh’s point is that if you leave this notion out of the novel, you cannot have a whole novel because you do not have complete characters. What defines human nature is that we are creatures of God and that we have a defined purpose.
Waugh gives us a first-person narrator, an artistic device not used in his earlier novels. We have one character telling us the story. The Prologue, set in 1942, introduces us to Charles Ryder, in the midst of World War Two. He is, as the novel begins, giving us a sense of the time and place in which he finds himself: the midst of war. If this book was religious propaganda rather than literature, Charles, from the beginning, having converted (a fact we do not fully learn until the end) would be upbeat, chipper, and handing out rosaries to his fellow infantrymen. There are all too often occasions, especially in the modern world, when even Catholics become discouraged. Events can overwhelm any individual. As the book begins, Charles is in a state where he finds himself empty and his life drained of meaning.
Waugh shows he is a master in the very first paragraph of the Prologue. Any good introduction to any piece of writing should set out the major themes. Waugh does it right away: “When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the gray mist of early morning.” That is the whole novel in miniature in one sentence.
Our narrator has climbed to the top of a hill. He has paused and is looking back. The title suggests “Brideshead Remembered.” The novel will be one of retrospection and memory. At this point, he is just looking back at the camp. But the bulk of the novel will be him looking back at his immediate past. As he looks back, the camp comes into full view below him.
Why do we look back? Why do we reminisce? When we are moving through life, and are in the midst of any event, action, or point in time, we cannot see it all clearly. As I grow older, I am more and more convinced that, as things happen to you in this life, you often do not understand them while you are in the midst of them. But as you look back, you always see a pattern or design that makes sense. That is what this novel is about. It assumes that, by looking back, and re-tracing steps, one can find a design or purpose.
Here we merely have an artistic creator designing a complex narrative. But he is giving us a sense that, in the larger sphere of human life, there is design, because there is a divine Creator Who gave a defined purpose to each human being. Our job is to co-operate with grace to find that purpose. It is not easy to see the past clearly or honestly; it will take Charles the whole book to understand his own life.
The Epilogue also takes place in 1942. But between the Prologue and Epilogue, the novel is divided into two unequal books, each of which has a particular design. But in the Prologue itself, we get more of a sense of who Charles is and what has happened to him. We get an echo, in the present moment, of the story of his life:
We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months ago, the place was under snow. Now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. So spring is on the horizon. The first shoots are coming up. It is a hopeful beginning although it is still winter. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.
Let us look at the final two sentences of the novel:
I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our ante-room. “You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” said the second-in-command.
“Here love had died between me and the army.” The military life is not a congenial one. Please notice that, throughout the novel, we get lines like these which structure the whole book for us: “Charles Ryder, seeking love, and having love die.”
At the beginning of Book One, Charles is a failed young man. He does not know himself. He is leaving a desolate world with no sense of belief or purpose. He is simply going through the motions. He goes to Oxford as that was what was expected. Throughout the first section of the novel, in meeting Sebastian and living through that “romantic friendship”, he thinks he has found a kind of love. But the love fails. What we watch is a painful chronicle of Sebastian falling to pieces and Charles having no idea how to help him. He says at one point “How could I, who could so little help myself, help anyone?”
By the end of Book One, he has become a real artist. But then Lady Marchmain dies almost simultaneously as he begins his art studies in Paris. There is a pattern: the failed young man becomes a successful artist. In the midst of this, in the process of becoming an artist, he believes that he has found a new real love in his art, but this attachment will also fail him. Book One ends with the death of Lady Marchmain and the closing of the chapel at Brideshead.
Book Two begins with Charles Ryder, the failed artist. He is coming back from Latin America where he has created a set of architectural paintings. Everyone loves them, but we learn from the harsh and severe critic, Anthony Blanche, that they are not good. Anthony actually calls them an “imposture.” He is an abusive and cruel evaluator and so we know that Charles has failed as an artist.
But he thinks he has found love again, this time with Sebastian’s sister, Julia. He states Sebastian was the forerunner. And throughout the book we have this comparison between brother and sister: they have the same looks, the same features, and many of the same attitudes. Sebastian actually says at one point: “My sister is very like me, which is why I don’t like to spend much time around her. Although she doesn’t have my character; I couldn’t love anyone with my character.” It is witty, but it is indicative of his self-hatred that ultimately causes his self-destruction through alcoholism.
Charles’ love for Julia also fails. But at the end of the Second Book, he becomes a real saved soul. What accomplishes this serious transformation? Lord Marchmain’s death. This novelistic structure is simple, but done with artistic perfection. Failure to success: failed man to successful artist; failed artist to successful Catholic. What got in the way? False loves that fail. The first love failed because of Sebastian’s self-destruction. The second love failed because Julia returned to the Faith. Lady Marchmain dies at the end of Book One, and the chapel closed. Lord Marchmain dies at the end of Book Two, and the chapel is re-opened. Everything is balanced. This is indicative of the simple design and solid structure that Waugh believed in, as fundamental to story-telling as to cabinet-making.
There are, however, many other strands in the weaving of the narrative. What we are doing is trying to get a sense of what the journey is about. The basic story is the pilgrimage of a single soul, the salvation of Charles Ryder. It is one soul receiving grace, coming into contact with the Flyte family. Grace is everywhere. In the end, many characters are saved.
There is a subtitle to this novel: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. The book is being written during the time Charles spends in the military as the war grinds on. They are sacred memories due to the ending, when Charles becomes a Catholic; grace works on his soul and he finds the true Faith. But, as stated before, this is a profane pilgrimage as these characters are immersed in the modern world that is profoundly desolate, godless, and empty.
In the midst of this sinful world, Waugh presents profane and sinful love. But as God always brings good out of evil, life moves forward through Providence, and Charles finds the Church. Even the name “Ryder” implies a pilgrimage, a movement. (Many of the character names have their own similar significance.) Waugh gives us one narrator, but two perspectives. Captain Charles Ryder is writing the book at a particular time and so we are given the perspective of age looking back on youth, as well as the immediacy of life as first experienced in youth. In this sense, the novel is about youth and maturity and the two different perspectives.
In the original manuscript, Waugh included an epigraph at the beginning of the book, which he dropped before it was published. It was a quote from Hebrews, 13:14: “For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come.” In terms of it being a memory-novel, there is no lasting city. Everything that makes up the core of the novel is memory. Charles is seeking something permanent in terms of love, a permanence that he can only find in the love of God. He is also looking for something to anchor him, which cannot be found in the worldly city. Of course, this comes straight from St. Augustine. Augustine actually permeates the entire book; his ideas appear in many places, but very clearly in this novel the City of God stands in opposition to the City of Man. The two cannot be one. The City of Man will vanish; it is corrupt and profane. The City of God is eternal. “We seek one that is to come”; that is Charles’ search.
Again, we are talking about a lasting city. And a city is made up of many, not just one. At the end of Book One, there is a wonderful discussion. Charles has been painting in London at Marchmain House before it gets torn down for a block of flats. This is a vision of the constant change of the modern world: we are always ripping things down and building something new in its place. Anyone who lives in a city or suburb realizes a year doesn’t go by without construction of this sort. I’m tempted to think that America’s motto should not be “In God We Trust,” but “What can we tear up next?” There is an insane desire to rip things up and replace them in a false delusion of progress.
We are told Marchmain House is quite beautiful but nevertheless it is going to be ripped down. Charles is painting it, and in the process being inspired to do some of his best work. The lovely Cordelia is watching him, shedding grace wherever she goes. It is almost as if at this moment she is his muse. She asks if he will take her out to dinner; he agrees. As they are walking to dinner, she talks about the chapel being shut at Brideshead. She asks him if he has ever been to Tenebrae. He says, “Never.” She responds: “Well, if you’d had, you’d know what the Jews said about their temple: quomodo sedet sola civitas. It’s a beautiful chant; you ought to go once, just to hear it.”
The words are the first verse of the Lamentations of Jeremiah from Tenebrae: “How doth the city sit solitary, that once was full of people!” This sense of the desolation of the modern, worldly city that has turned its back on God never left Waugh. At the very end of the Epilogue, Charles is thinking over what happened to Brideshead. He says: “The house built, generation from generation, until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper. The place was desolate and the work all came to nothing. Quomodo sedet sola civitas.” Now he knows it; he’s been to Tenebrae at some point. He echoes Cordelia’s words.
Brideshead is, in a sense, desolate in the end. It has been taken over by the army. Everything that Charles thought at first was beautiful or important has been affected. The soldiers have been romping through, destroying some of Charles’ own paintings and knocking the heads off of statues. But he finds the tabernacle lamp re-lighted at the end. It is a sign of the City of God, a permanent and lasting hope. So even if there is desolation in the earthly city, there is always hope in the heavenly city. Again we see this balance. The point is that there is an extraordinary structure to this book. It is very well put together.
Every detail is somehow, in the course of the novel, balanced. Nothing is there that does not have a reason. Charles at one point remembers the first time he saw Sebastian at Oxford, in a barber shop:
I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable, for from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behavior, which seemed to know no bounds. My first sight of him was in the door of Germer’s, and on that occasion, I was struck less by his looks and more by the fact he was carrying a large teddy-bear.
We find out that the teddy-bear is named Aloysius. Sebastian has come to the barber to get a hair-brush with “Aloysius” engraved on it. It was not for brushing, but for threatening the bear when he was sulky. Yet the barber is charmed by him. We see the deadly charm that Anthony Blanche warns against, the charm which permeates the whole family.
Charles says, “I, however, remained censorious and subsequent glimpses of Sebastian, driving in a hansom cab and dining at the George in false whiskers, did not soften me, although Collins, who was reading Freud, had a number of technical terms to cover everything.” What we will learn is that Sebastian is a complex, mysterious human being, not someone easily explained by Freud. At the beginning of Book One, Sebastian runs around in a fake beard. At the beginning of Book Two, we see Charles with a beard when he meets Julia. The first thing he does when he meets her is have it shaved. This is artistic precision and structure. The book is loaded with this. It is why you can read it over and over, and be delighted and surprised. It is unbelievably complex. Yet it is also an easy read as it is so well-written.
We see a peopled city, a whole family, a whole world in time. Any novel gives us particulars. The novel is able to render complete and whole worlds. Moby Dick gives us the whaling industry in 19th-century America. The Scarlet Letter gives us Puritan New England. War and Peace gives us the Napoleonic wars in Russia. David Copperfield gives us Victorian England. Novels give us, through accumulated details, a sense of time and place.
Brideshead Revisited gives us Britain between the wars. We get Britain during the Second World War in the military camps. We get Oxford in the ’20s. We get the “bright young people” in London. We see how the upper class lived. We see the world of politics in the concerns of Rex Mottram. We see Venice in the ’20s and even a glimpse of Paris—the fine French restaurant at which Charles dines with Rex. We get a bit of Latin America, including what it was like to make a shipboard crossing at that time. It is a believable, real world and yet, as Waugh creates it, we are told that it has already vanished.
Everyone agrees that the Oxford pages are simply extraordinary. What Waugh is doing is capturing his own memories as an undergraduate in the ’20s. He does it through Charles going back and re-creating the moment through memory:
Indeed, as the life of Oxford is presented to us—and we take a kind of delight in it—we are enchanted to meet Sebastian and his luncheon parties. Waugh himself is reveling in the memory of his youth to some extent. Even Anthony Blanche, for all of his peculiarities, is very funny. We see the wit and grace but we see it must be swept away. It is worldly. What lasts? The novel asks this in its opening pages. It will tell us by the end.
Looking back, at the beginning, Charles speaks about his loss of love for the army: “I felt as a husband might feel who suddenly realized he was out of love with his wife.” Of course, that is what has happened to Charles and his marriage at the beginning of Book Two. A failure of love is everywhere in every sphere. Sadly, the least important and interesting of the failed loves is Charles’ failure of love with his own wife. When we find out about it, at the beginning of Book Two, we are shocked. When did he get married? To whom? He gets married “off-page.” It is clearly Waugh’s sense of his own first failed marriage, a marriage undertaken whimsically for no serious reason.
There are only a few exceptions. There is a moment when Sebastian is in disgrace because of his drunkenness. Sebastian tells Charles that he is coming to stay with him in London. As Charles is leaving Brideshead, Cordelia asks him if he will see Sebastian. He tells her he will and she asks him to give Sebastian “my love; my special love. Remember my special love.” Charles mentions this to Sebastian and Sebastian does not even reply; he changes the subject. And yet, our final vision of Sebastian comes from Cordelia. She is the last one of the characters to see him alive, the person through whose lips we learn about his probable end. Cordelia’s love has not failed; she has gone in search of her brother and finds him. Her love cannot fail because her love is based on the highest love. Cordelia is a believer from the beginning. She is a scamp at times in her delightful youthful days, but she has her eyes set on the heavenly city, and her love cannot fail.
Josef Pieper, in A Defense of Philosophy, says that there are only two things that can shake a mind out of its stupor and get it thinking again: love and death. These are the two big events which are so shattering that they start the reflective process. Brideshead Revisited is about love and death.
The first part of the book, Et in Arcadia ego, “Even in Arcadia I am there,” is inscribed on the skull that Charles has at Oxford after he has met Sebastian. Even in the midst of the beauty and glory of those first days at Brideshead, when Charles said “I believed I was very close to Heaven in those days,” he wasn’t really. He was getting a glimpse of something beautiful, but even there, death was waiting. The destructive force which eventually descends on Sebastian has been already present.
Since I am not doing this analysis in a systematic order, let us consider the entire Flyte family. Charles cannot be understood apart from this. It is the Flyte home that Charles is invited to. Note the name: “Flyte.” Most of them are in flight from the Church, from truth, particularly the head of the family who most clearly should be the head and guide, Lord Marchmain. The family is divided into two. Lord Marchmain, the patriarch, who should be ruling his estate and family, has flown the coop. He was first married, built the chapel for his wife, and then left for the war. He could not bear to come back. Why? Because, as Cara tells us, “he hates her.” This is the same conversation where Cara tells Charles his “romantic friendship” is a Northern trait, not a Latin one.
Lord Marchmain’s “romantic friendship” was with his wife. And it ended. Cara asks Charles if he thinks Marchmain loves her. Charles is embarrassed that she even asks. Cara opines that he does not love her, but stays with her only because she protects him from his wife. “He won’t go back.” It is very odd, but this hatred for Lady Marchmain, an intense dislike shared by many of the characters (and incidentally by many readers) is defined for us by Cordelia. Cordelia speaks the following words shortly after Lady Marchmain’s death: “I got on best with her of any of us. But I don’t believe I ever really loved her.” This from Cordelia, who is a veritable fountain of love. What she means is that she did not love her mother as she should. “It is odd I didn’t, since I am full of natural affection.” Charles says, “I never really knew your mother.” She replies: “You didn’t like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God, they hated Mummy.”
Waugh, in one of his letters, said that he did not like Lady Marchmain either—but that God does. It is an absolutely true fact of life that, oftentimes, the best people in the world, those who make us tow the line, those who keep us responsible and who call us to duty, setting the ideal, are not likable people. Often we want nothing to do with them. They are a living reproach to those who are not living properly. It is what Archbishop Lefebvre was to the other bishops. It is what the Society of St. Pius X has been to the rest of the Church.
Hence, the anger and rage. How dare we set a good example. Charles replies to Cordelia, asking her to clarify. She says:
“She was saintly, but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and His saints, they have to find something like themselves and pretends it’s God, and hate that. I suppose you think that’s all bosh.”
Charles replies that Lord Marchmain hates Lady Marchmain, as Sebastian does also. Julia doesn’t hate her, but also didn’t love her. Sebastian was more like his mother, and Julia more like her father; it’s why Lord Marchmain leaves the estate to her. Those two children are the descendants of Lord Marchmain and are known as “Julia Flyte” and “Sebastian Flyte” and are both fleeing the truth and their mother.
The other two children, Brideshead and Cordelia, are quite different. They are plain compared to Julia and Sebastian. The two plain offspring are devout, never shaken in their faith. The family is quite literally divided into two. And this plays a large role in the whole story.
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