Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited. Waugh, Evelyn. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945.

This is one of those books that I had been wanting to read for a long time. I have a particular interest in upper-class British (a)morality. I've read another of Waugh's novels called A Handful of Dust (which I will eventually review here) and didn't like it all that much but this one is much less satirical and focuses on a English landowning family who just happen to be Catholic.

The novel begins with a obtuse description of military exercises in the countryside. The narrator Charles Ryder comes across an essentially deserted mansion and with much melancholy (which he hides from his subordinates) begins the tale of his acquaintance with the Marchmain family. This book is composed of two parts. The first covers Charles relationship with Sebastian while the latter concerns Charles' successes as a painter and his ill-fated love affair with Sebastian's sister Julia.

Looking back on this novel I am reminded of that football saying; "a match of two halves." The favored team plays terribly in the first half. The manager berates them during the interval and lo and behold the chumps become heroes in the second half as everyone plays to their potential in a showing of teamwork and collective brotherhood. Yes, Brideshead Revisited is like that, except unlike in the football archetype the stinker is the second half.

The beginning of this novel is captivating. I have yet to come across such an enchanting view of undergraduate life at Oxford. So often in British literature the Oxbridge reference is just a code word for class; an inevitable afterthought that a gentleman studies there. Waugh went to Oxford and he does an excellent job of depicting the intellectual cliques among the student body as well as the bacchanalia of which modern readers are perhaps more familiar when reminiscing about university.

Charles becomes friends with the utterly enchanting and painstakingly handsome Sebastian Flyte (not Marchmain, the names in this novel are really confusing). There's a kind of cool ambient feeling as you follow them along throughout Europe getting drunk and hanging out. Less obvious is a homosexual attraction that (due to the time the novel was written) never quite passes from subtle to obvious but is nevertheless undoubtedly there, fueled by Sebastian's developing alcoholism. Also worth nothing about the first part of this novel is the delightful variety of Charles and Sebastian's mutual acquaintances, including the outrageous Anthony Blanche, an unabashed Latin American quasi British homosexual whose piercing analysis of the Marchmain family at first glance seems ridiculous but actually ends up being absolutely spot on.

And then we come to the primary family of the story (given far more attention than Charles' withdrawn father and cousin, the haughty man-about-town Oxford gent Jasper): the Marchmains. You will recall that the Marchmains are Catholic and indeed so devout is their faith that the parents are separated but not divorced given the stigma attached to a violation of the sanctity of marriage. Instead of the dreadful divorce Lord Marchmain lives in Venice with his mistress and he lets Lady Teresa Marchmain and their four children stay in Brideshead (the magisterial, labyrinthine family mansion). Lord Marchmain's conversion to Catholicism and eventual hatred of his wife (with a little post WWI trauma thrown in) explain why a man would live a thousand miles away from his family. Indeed, England is simply too small a place for Lord Marchmain. He needs a continent of space to be away from his estranged wife. This may be absolutely mad behavior but please observe what I call Catholic...shall we say...eccentricity. Regardless of what the reader may think of Lord Marchmain as a character, you have to admit that he chose the mysterious way to end a marriage.

Sebastian's alcoholism drives this story along. It is alcohol that allows him to engage in homosexual behavior with Charles but it is also alcoholism that causes him to sever ties with pretty much everything in his life; Oxford (he is "sent down"), his family and friends. Remarkably, the homosexual element in this novel is never really detected by anyone in the Marchmain family. The most marked reference to it comes from Lord Marchmain's mistress Cara. Sebastian's childishness aides his growing dependency on alcohol. Like many similar sorts of characters from rich families, Sebastian is spoiled rotten and may not have an intellectual bone in his body, to put it mildly. But that doesn't really matter according to Anthony Blanche and Charles because both admit that Sebastian's charm is unyielding and dependable. No one who meets him can possibly hate him. So predictably enough, through the use of liquor, Sebastian comes to be unhappy himself and destroys his life.

This novel was written back when alcoholism had to be necessarily hushed about (even when the problem itself is obvious), most especially since the Marchmains are rich and aristocratic. Lady Marchmain enlists the help of Charles in trying to curb her son's drinking but Charles can only roll over and put up a smidgen of resistance toward his best friend. Charles and Sebastian have a kind of "us against the world" mentality, which certainly suggests that the homosexual affair they have is not some innocent fleeting attraction that goes away. Rather than deal with sending her son to Lindsay Lohan style rehab (as the rich do today), Lady Marchmain decides to send him on a trip to the Middle East with her puppet, the Oxford don Samgrass. This ends up being a tremendous error in judgment on Teresa's part since Sebastian keeps giving Samgrass the slip and the latter is really a sychophant who only agrees to look after Sebastian in order to further his personal ambitions and ingratiate himself to Oxford's elite.

The end result is that Sebastian absconds from Samgrass' care and filches his travelling companion's money. At this point both Charles and Sebastian have dropped out of school and the former is working as an artist in Paris. Lady Marchmain, in a sort of authoritative Sisterly sort of way, does not blame Charles for her son's alcoholism but cannot condone the latter's lack of resistance toward Sebastian's petulant "I do what I want" attitude. And so, in a dramatic and foreboding scene Charles is "banished" from Brideshead and he can't help but feel that this is a certain turning point in his life; this shutting out from the splendor of magical Brideshead and its quirky inhabitants.

And so that's the end of the novel...Ha! No it's only the end of the first part! Yet you can see that this novel could have ended right then and there. No. It drags on. And instead of concerning itself with the burgeoning youthfulness of Sebastian and Charles, we instead hear about the egotism and (dare I say it?) boredom of Charles' life. Perhaps not the best terms for describing an artist, but it is time that I editorialize: I do not like post-Sebastian Charles all that much.

His love for Sebastian's sister Julia struck me as a symptom of a midlife crisis. While he acknowledges Julia's beauty when he meets her earlier on in the novel there just does not seem to be any attraction between them until it all of a sudden springs up when they happen to be on the same ship. Charles acknowledges that Sebastian was the harbinger for his love for Julia but that seems like baloney to me. It's one thing to never forget a first love, but there seems to be a conscious effort on the part of Charles to forget about Sebastian now that he's chosen to live like an outcast in Morocco. I just don't buy the way in which Charles simply transfers his love for Sebastian to Julia. It strikes me as egotistical and pathetic.

The novel seems to drag on toward the end. Charles and Julia have to dissolve their respective marriages. It's not that hard a task for Charles as he dislikes his wife and their relationship has no passion. Charles seems to have no affection toward his children either which is kind of weird.

I don't want to give away the ending which is not really all that good anyway. Like I said; a match of two halves. Waugh is still capable of a brilliant phrase so I won't call this novel a complete waste of time.