Brideshead Re-re-revisited

Having read Hitchens on the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, I then had another go at the novel, which I used to think over-written and absurd. I was especially uncharmed by the winsome Sebastian and his teddy bear. Evelyn Waugh’s prose is economic as a rule, sometimes to the point of sketchiness; in Brideshead Revisited it is stately and melancholic, stopping off from narrative and dialogue to display an extended metaphor. So Charles Ryder tells of his disenchantment with the army thus:-

“I . . felt as a husband might feel, who, . . suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife;. . . I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion . . .I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognised the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. . . .I learned her slatternly ways; the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying.“

There are many such passages, which I used to think were overblown, but now I think them fine. They are like a Holman Hunt painting, The Disillusioned Husband. They add a grand pictorialness, suitable for a novel, which among its themes has one dealing with the visual arts. Like Charles Ryder, I have become a convert and regard Brideshead Revisited as extraordinary.

Brideshead Revisited opens with the narrator Charles Ryder finding himself after many years absence at Brideshead, the grand house which was his paradise. He was expelled, regained it for a short time but was expelled again. Now he drifts in a dry purgatory of loss.

Charles Ryder came to know Brideshead through his friendship with Sebastian Flyte, one of the sons of the house. Charles is often seen as a social climber but he is really an artist, and it is the beauty and glamour of Sebastian, Brideshead and the rest of the family that attract him, not their status.

Brideshead speaks to Charles of nobler times, while modern life is rubbish, as it always is with Waugh. Modern art is bosh, the centres of ancient cultures like Fez or Rome are regarded as merely dirty by their unworthy inheritors, bathrooms are clinical instead of picturesque. Modern life is “where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity”. The villains of the novel, Rex Mottram, the inconvenient husband of Charles’s beloved Julia, and Celia, Charles’s equally inconvenient wife, have embraced modern life. Julia describes Rex as “something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce.” Celia is like an American (always a sign of damnation) and “hygienic”.

Rex and Celia are ruthless in self-advancement, rather like those barons and producers of wool that acquired the wealth to build Brideshead must have been, while the heirs by birth are ineffectual, unable even to keep hold of what their ancestors created. Sebastian becomes a drunk, Bridey, an eccentric collector of matchboxes, Julia, a wilful beauty wasting her life, Cordelia a sexless half nun.

In profane terms they have lost, but the main theme of the novel is that in the eyes of god this does not matter. So Sebastian is a holy fool, Bridey a clear-headed devout Catholic, Julia has an overpowering sense of her sins and Cordelia does good works and is full of wisdom. The family’s attitude to Sebastian’s alcoholism is anxiety about his soul rather than shame at his drinking. “There’s nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know.” Bridey says of his brother. “There’s no moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live to walk ten miles at eighty.” Goodness does not mean respectability. However, when it comes to the villains Charles’s judgement of Rex rests not so much on god's laws as Debrett's. Rex’s main sin is that he doesn’t know a good brandy from a bad one. (The Catholic writer Chesterton, who is referred to in the novel, was a democrat and did not confuse vulgarity and evil. Waugh wasn't and does.) Celia is pretentious, and one of her pretensions is to be devoted to her children, and to be hurt that her husband is indifferent to their new baby. So Charles’s chief failings, of being a chillingly dismissive snob and a callous father, are not acknowledged.

But it is not failings but sins that matter, sins against god rather than against our fellow creatures. In this the philosophy of Brideshead Revisited is as different to the humanism of novels of the Victorian era as Waugh's prose is to Victorian heaviness. The moral climax of Brideshead Revisited arises from a doctrine about divorce and remarriage which along with celibacy for the clergy is peculiar to Catholicism among the Abrahamic religions. You have to go along with it as you have to go along with the convention of rightful inheritance in the Victorians, however arbitrary and unreasonable it seems. By the time I had got there via the dialogue, the vividness of the minor characters and the grand set-pieces I was happy enough to fall into line, and be moved by the final scene when Charles “homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless,” wanders around a Brideshead desecrated by war has an epiphany of the flame of faith continuing to burn.

According to Hitchens the film gets the Catholicism wrong.  In 1950 Graham Greene had been proposed as the screen-writer for a Hollywood version and Waugh was delighted because he would not muff the theology.   So how crushing it would have been to him that Andrew Davies, the master of corsetry and shaggery when it comes to adapting classic novels, has got his spermy hand in this latest enterprise. Crushing, but not surprising, because it's what he would have expected from rubbishy modern life.

I won’t then bother with the film adaptation until it comes on to the telly and I shall then watch it for the clothes. The television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited was a big hit in the 80’s. A friend of mine was at Oxford when they filmed the scenes there and said that the golden lads of nineteen had to be played by twenty five year olds as they were less spotty.