Brideshead Revisited: A Commentary—Part 5
In Part 5 of Dr. White’s lecture on Brideshead Revisited, he continues his analysis of the novel, focusing on character development and the artistic depth of the plot.
The major responsibility for what has happened to the family in Brideshead Revisited rests on Lord Marchmain. He fails as a father. He has not been present to raise his children. He turned and he ran. There can be little doubt that part of the problem Sebastian faces is that he has never really had a father. All through this novel, there are no fathers. Lord Marchmain has deserted his children and Charles Ryder’s father is extremely eccentric–distant, self-absorbed, unfeeling. This bizarre portrait of Charles’s father is said to be based on Waugh’s own father.
When Charles arrives at Oxford, the novel reads: “I had been warned against the dangers of these rooms by my cousin Jasper, who alone, when I first came up, thought me a suitable subject for detailed guidance. My father offered me none.” His father gave him no guidance. Curiously, his cousin says: “I suppose this is the time I should give you advice. I never had any myself except once from your cousin Alfred.” There are no fathers in this novel. Even Anthony Blanche only has a stepfather.
Throughout the novel, men have deserted their families. They have quit. In Charles’s case, it is even worse. Sebastian does not want Charles to meet his family and we get this dialogue:
“I don’t keep asking you questions about your family.”
“Neither do I about yours.”
“But you look inquisitive.”
“Well, you’re so mysterious about them.”
“I hoped I was mysterious about everything.”
“Perhaps I am rather curious about people’s families—you see, it’s not a thing I know about. There is only my father and myself. An aunt kept an eye on me for a time but my father drove her abroad. My mother was killed in the war.”
“Oh...how very unusual.”
“She went to Serbia with the Red Cross....”
Unable to live any longer in the house, Charles’s mother left home to do charity work. The depictions of Charles dining with his father give us insight into this. There is a complete removal from the natural joys of life. This is part of the reason Charles is a failed young man in the beginning of the novel. He has grown up in a dead, lifeless, loveless, bleak home, in which there has been no sense that God created a world full of delightful and glorious wonders. It lacks the Catholic sense, the Catholic sense that recognizes that bread, wine, and water are good in themselves and may be transformed into eternal and lasting things. This awareness tells us that the things of the world can be beautiful and are here for our use. We cannot be attached to them since they will pass. But we can appreciate them and understand higher truths through them.
So when Charles gets to Oxford, coming out of that dead world and meets Sebastian, he begins to grasp the glory of the created world. Charles is discovering life, something he has never known. This is how he speaks about it. When he first gets invited to lunch at Sebastian’s, he says:
I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that gray city.
He is seeking magic in the midst of grayness. The next sentence tells us that Sebastian lives at Christ Church, his college. Sebastian may be running from the Faith; he may hate his mother; but it is through Sebastian that Charles is first introduced to and comes to know the Faith.
Before this, Charles has known no human attachment. When Sebastian at Brideshead breaks a small bone in his foot, he sends a note telling Charles to come to Brideshead at once. When Charles informs his father, his father says:
“Why exactly is your presence so necessary? You have no medical knowledge. You are not in holy orders. Do you hope for a legacy?”
“I told you, he is a great friend.”
“Well, Orme-Herrick is a great friend of mine, but I should not go tearing off to his deathbed on a warm Sunday afternoon.”
Here again we see the absence of love, an absence of human connection. But Charles will break out of this dead, gray home and, at the end, far beyond his own father’s seeming indifference to death, he will kneel by Lord Marchmain’s bedside when the old man is in extremis and utter what may be his first prayer: “O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.” The prayer is barely authentic, and is stumbling, but God uses this prayer for authentic ends.
Energy and love come into Charles’s life. But it is a false love, a romantic friendship. It is somewhat inappropriate. He himself says: “I was given a brief spell of what I had never known: a happy childhood.” He speaks of those days with Sebastian as a childhood, since he never has had a chance to be a child and romp in the joys of the world, which is what children should do.
And though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalog of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
This is the older Charles looking back and judging himself. What he focuses on is the joy of discovering the world of Sebastian, whether it is eating exotic eggs or going to Venice. But Sebastian, who is the center of Book One, is a tortured soul. He cannot guide himself through the world in any way. He is a character lacking direction and control.
He is also willful and single-minded. Charles himself says at one point: “Sebastian’s life was governed by a code of such imperatives. ‘I must have pillar-box red pajamas,’ ‘I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows,’ I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!’”
This is witty and funny but it is willful. It is the willfulness of a child. Of course, Sebastian is still a child. He will not give up his teddy-bear. He clings to his childhood. But he names his teddy-bear St. Aloysius, patron saint of Catholic youth. He is watched over by the prayers of his mother. But when Sebastian returns home to Brideshead, he wants to visit his nanny. There is an attachment. When he goes fox-hunting, his horse’s name is Tinkerbell. It is part of his charm, but it is also unhealthy. Cara, when she talks to Charles in Venice, tells him that Sebastian drinks too much, and not in the way others drink. He is a self-indulgent child. Cara says of him that he is in love with his own childhood.
Every time Sebastian is mentioned, there is discussion of shadows. The first time we go to Brideshead, it is a beautiful, sunny day. Sebastian and Charles drink wine, eat strawberries, and lie quietly in nature, enjoying the child’s sense of timelessness. But it is false. Sebastian says: “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”
Charles says: “That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.”
The shade is already there; the shadows keep encroaching. When we see Sebastian’s room at Oxford the place is a jumble. It makes no sense; things don’t go together:
His room was filled with a strange jumble of objects–a harmonium in a Gothic case, an elephant’s-foot waste-paper basket, a dome of wax fruit, two disproportionately large Sevres vases, framed drawings by Daumier.
The one room that makes sense aesthetically belongs to Lady Marchmain. Keep in mind that the house is a palace of art. It contains many beautiful objects, but it has been neglected by its owner. When Sebastian first shows the house, he has to open all the curtains as huge sections of the house are closed off. The heart of the house, however, is Lady Marchmain’s room. If the father has deserted them, the children are preserved by the love of the mother, whose room is the heart of the home:
This room was all her own; she had taken it for herself and changed it so that, entering, one seemed to be in another house. She had lowered the ceiling, and the elaborate cornice which, in one form or another, graced every room, was lost to view; the walls, once paneled in brocade, were stripped and washed blue and spotted with innumerable little water-colors of fond association; the air was sweet with the fresh scent of flowers and musty potpourri; her library in soft leather covers, well-read works of poetry and piety, filled a small rosewood bookcase; the chimney-piece was covered with small personal treasures–an ivory Madonna, a plaster St. Joseph, posthumous miniatures of her three soldier brothers. When Sebastian and I lived alone at Brideshead during that brilliant August we had kept out of his mother’s room.
That room, the Catholic mother’s room, is the Catholic heart of the house. When Sebastian and Charles are reveling in worldly delights, they do not go near it. This heart is always there, but it is pierced with sorrow. Constantly there are references associating Lady Marchmain with the Seven Sorrows of our Lady. She watches her husband leave, Sebastian fall to pieces, Julia enter into a bad marriage, and, finally, she submits calmly to the cancer that eats her away. She suffers. But there is the repeated question: “Who is going with me to chapel tonight?” Off the family will go to say their rosary and pray. She is constantly praying for the family, for the renegades, for those who have run away–for her husband, for Sebastian, for Julia. Because she prays, the hope of an answer becomes possible, a resolution she does not live to see. She says to Charles at one point: “I prayed for you too in the night.” That prayer will also be answered.
We learn of two characters throughout the novel who pray for Charles–Lady Marchmain and Cordelia. The prayers are answered. We have a sense of the power of prayer, but Waugh does not blast it home; we see the effects of the prayers in what happens to Charles at the end. Nevertheless, Lady Marchmain is human. There is a moment where she openly accuses Charles of being wicked, when he gives money to Sebastian so he can leave the fox hunt and get drunk. She says, “How could you be so wicked? Did you hate us all the time?” We learn she has a bad conscience. One reason she feels guilty is because Charles is not the only one who has been giving money to Sebastian; later we learn that Cordelia has been sneaking money to him also.
Cordelia. She is obviously named after the good daughter in King Lear who is the truth-teller. This Cordelia plays the truth telling role in this novel as does her namesake in Shakespeare’s great tragedy. I have pointed out that this novel is without fathers; sadly, it is also without children. There seems to be no future generation. Julia has one child who dies during child-birth. Sebastian obviously has no children. Cordelia never marries. Bridey marries a woman past child-bearing age and inherits a family, but has no children of his own. Curiously, however, the only two characters who are associated with living children are Bridey, who, eccentric though he is, will presumably be a good step-father, and Cordelia, who sponsors black children in Africa. “You send five bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after you. I’ve got six black Cordelias already. Isn’t it lovely?”
But there is a wonderful sense that God works everywhere. When I first became a traditional Catholic, I remember going back one day after Mass to ask a question of my priest. I had to wait as a little girl had already approached the priest with her new baby hamster that she wanted to have blessed. As I waited, I remember thinking: “This is Catholic.” When that little girl left, she was beaming, and the animal had been sanctified. So we may laugh at Cordelia, but she is Catholic to the core. God guards everything we love. The life in this book comes from this vision.
As the truth-teller, Cordelia plays her role openly. There is the moment when she promises to pray for Charles. She is the one who goes to see Sebastian when he is too drunk to come downstairs. Charles lies and says Sebastian has a cold, but Cordelia returns from her visit and states quite openly that Sebastian is drunk. (This incident occurs on the night that Lady Marchmain is reading aloud one of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories to the family. From this story Waugh takes the title for Book Two of Brideshead Revisited, “A Twitch upon a Thread.” The whole line reads: “For I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line that will allow him to travel to the ends of the earth and come back with a twitch upon the thread.” This is an image of God’s regard for each human soul. He has got us; we can break the line and run where we want, but God’s hook is in us.)
Consider the moment when Julia announces that she is going to marry Rex outside the Church. Cordelia says “I hate you, Julia!” and runs away, weeping. And then we learn that on the morning of the wedding in the shabby Protestant church, Cordelia has come to Julia’s room with a gift, telling her sister that she hopes she will always be happy. This is a real feminine love, another beauty that sadly has mostly vanished from the world.
At the end of the novel, Cordelia is talking with her father, who is thinking about his life, remembering what he’s done:
“There used to be a chaplain until the war. Do you remember him?”
“I was too young.”
“Then I went away–left her in the chapel praying. It was hers. It was the place for her. I never came back to disturb her prayers. They said we were fighting for freedom; I had my own victory. Was it a crime?”
“I think it was, papa.”
Suddenly, he is filled with guilt as his daughter has spoken a harsh truth to him, accusing him of a crime against his family. Her comment is as succinct and direct as her namesake’s response to her kingly father in the first scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Let me say a few words about Bridey. Bridey is also a truth-teller, but he is not exactly aware of when he is telling the truth. This leads to his dropping bombshells. Bridey has no social sense at all. He puts his foot in his mouth all the time. It is probably part of the reason he has not had a vocation; he just cannot connect with other people. He is a good man, but he is so eccentric that his life eventually narrows down to marrying Mrs. Muspratt and tending to her late husband’s matchbox collection. He has no real sense of purpose as to what he should be doing in the world. He is completely adrift. Yet he sparks the resolution of the novel, through a moment of truth, when he says to Julia that Mrs. Muspratt cannot spend the night under the same roof as Julia and Charles as they are openly adulterous and Mrs. Muspratt is a good Catholic woman. Charles immediately rebukes Bridey, but Bridey points out that Julia already knows this fact. Many eccentric characters in literature at first seem odd, but many of them we eventually warm up to. They are real. Bridey is real.
To conclude, we will consider the art and architecture of the novel. How is Brideshead constructed? What does Waugh say about art in this novel? A major theme of the novel is the glory of art but the failure of art as well.
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