I just finished rereading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a book I pick up every couple of years or so. This time I read it because of the new movie version movie (the one with Emma Thompson as the Lady Marchmain Flyte). As a critic, I get to see a pre-screening of the new movie on Tuesday; I am taking Dr. Steve. Also, I am a huge fan of the original, very-literal British miniseries from 1981 (it is the first thing that brought Jeremy Irons to international attention, and it had the excessively handsome Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte.). I don’t know exactly when the new movie is coming out.Speaking of coming out, it’s impossible to speak of Brideshead Revisited without talking about the strong homosexual themes. Then again, you also have to talk about the pressure of Catholicism and its attendant guilt. Finally, there is the sense of social climbing, of coveting and envy, that defines the story’s narrator, Charles Ryder.The story is about an upper middle-class boy, Charles Ryder and his integration into a rich English family. After years at boarding school and summers with only his absent-minded and oblivious father as family, Charles meets Sebastian Flyte their third year at Oxford. They immediately fall in love, though Sebastian pukes in Charles’ room.Sebastian is described as a pretty young man, the son of uber-rich Catholic aristocracy. Sebastian throws wild parties for his obviously gay friends (there is no hemming about Sebastian’s friends being fairies), and gets drunk repeatedly. He travels to Venice and the Continent and generally lives an extremely privileged life. He also carries around a teddy bear names Aloysius, which he speaks to as if it were a naughty child. He’s 19 and at college.Sebastian and Charles start a thinly veiled romance – one that has been alternately argued to be sexual or simply a romantic phase by young men. Charles is taken in by Sebastian, his effete friends, and his rich lifestyle, and they are quite open with their affection toward each other. I personally think they have repeated sex, the references to their love for each other, the moments of nudity, and the open discussions of homosexuality are too numerous to ignore.However, as Charles becomes more and more entrenched with the Flyte family, Sebastian grows bitter and drinks more. He tried to keep his life with Charles and his Catholic family separate. Sebastian possibly understands his romance with Charles is being taken over by his family. Perhaps Sebastian realizes his Catholic guilt will also kill his relationship with Charles. Slowly, Sebastian becomes a virulently self-destructive drunk, as the family communicates to Charles that they don’t mind their childish relationship, but that it is a phase that will need to pass. Charles also comes to understand the strength that the orthodox religion has on the family as he watches Sebastian slowly drink himself to death.Over the course of the novel, Charles transfers his affections to Sebastian’s equally unattainable sister, Julia. Charles blatantly admits that he finds Julia and Sebastian very similar in looks and temperament. God knows, the family’s vast wealth and glamour are also draws for Charles; it’s as if Charles will do anything to be a part of the Flyte family. He is a bit of a cipher, a mirror, a quiet man who attracts people because they are able to project upon him exactly what they wish him to be. Charles is a fascinating, longing narrator – there is a bit of The Talented Mr. Ripley in his envy and in his personal blankness. He lusts after Sebastian’s life, but also after Sebastian as a great, flamboyant and handsome man.However, there is such a sense of denigration from that first romance of Sebastian’s and Charles’, and it runs through the entire novel and even into Charles’ and Julia’s romance. The sense of lost innocence along with Sebastian’s deterioration from overdrinking is tragic. Charles admits that, in love, “Sebastian was the first;” he admits this openly to Julia and others. An entirely different sort of destruction happens in Charles’ and Julia’s romance. Both loves are assailed by Catholic guilt.Charles is an agnostic. His lack of religious knowledge and his criticism of Catholic hypocrisy is at first one of the things that attracts Sebastian to him. But it’s also the thing that dooms Charles’ relationship with the family.The mother, Lady Marchmain Flyte, is very pious – separated from her philandering husband (who lives with his mistress in Italy), but refusing to divorce the man for her Catholic beliefs. She is a strong and spiritual patriarch whose guilt and religiosity inspire hatred from her husband and children. Yet, Lady Marchmain doesn’t do anything particularly wrong, and there is a sense that she is an earthbound saint whose kin hate over their own deep senses of guilt – guilt over their own sins: their homosexuality, alcoholism, infidelity, and apostasy from the faith.It’s a frustrating novel. I sense author Waugh’s latent homosexuality, and there is a strong sense of his gross envy of the travels and money and wondrous things and parties and balls of the upper class like his narrator Charles does. Finally, there is the strong sense of Catholicism. You could either say the religion and its guilt-ridden patterns doom the Flyte family. Or you could say that it is the only moral compass that these people have and that God is waiting to pull them back into His fold, even after their darkest sins and self-destruction.The reclaiming of faith among the bourgeois and the over-privileged is the theme I think Waugh thought he was writing about. But there is a sense of such loss over their Bohemian innocence. And there is a palpable sense of guilt and shame that the Catholicism brings on – there doesn’t seem to be much mercy in Waugh’s God. Everything just slowly gets worse and sicker and more depressed. Perhaps that’s why I see the novel as a supreme and beautiful tragedy. Even though Charles comes to respect the spiritual belief and even attend to it some, I am still struck by the decay, the corrosion, the purification – of the beautiful house Brideshead and of its family, the Flytes.As a gay man and being from a Catholic family (although the Flytes are wealthy and we are white trash), I love this book, even as it frustrates me.
It is difficult to encapsulate a book which strives to reach for so much over the course of its pages. I'm sure I will miss some things, but perhaps that's best with a book like this. An epic style classic, I mean. There's always something more to dig out of it.The writing style is one of the most striking things about the book, let me just put that out there. This is due to the hodgepodge nature of the thing. The beginning of the book has quite a bit of high Romanticism, of a style more appropriate to the 1840s than the post WWII era- to the point where its utter cheesiness seems out of place, which often gives way to Madox Ford type of prose- unobtrusive, mild, wiltingly despairing, Lost Generation feelings. Towards the end of the book, you get some very modern, intentionally shocking bits and some existentialism. The Romanticism has entirely died. Obviously the choice of styles illustrates the journey of the main character/the main Flyte family through the novel, but I thought it was also an interesting way of encapsulating popular styles of writing that prevailed at the time, particularly in Britain in the interwar era. One of the major points of the book is to give a reading of the English character, and the styles covered many sides of it, I think. As to the story itself, it is a long metaphor for the death of the old way of life in England. A powerful English Catholic family, the Flytes, slowly crumbles from the inside as member by member by member they are struck down into death or into irrelevancy, doomed to live out their days as shadows of their former brilliance, unable to let go of the past or work with the future. The narrator, Charles Ryder, is not one of the family, but he is perfectly placed to see each demise as it occurs. It is a superemely heartbreaking piece as we get to see the crushing of each character's hopes and dreams in excruciating detail. I found myself becoming attached to the family, in spite of how awful and distancing that they could be, so well done to Waugh for that one. It does endow one with a sense of helplessness, though, just like the characters, that there is nothing that really could be done for them, prisoners as they are of ideology, centuries of history, societal expectations, family dramas, repressed (or not so repressed) sexuality, rand of course, and most of all, religion.The Catholic yarn of the novel burns perhaps the brightest of all. It is continually present, even under circumstances that one would believe had no call for it. Which is the point of it. Waugh paints a Catholicism that is everywhere, in everything, allows its followers no freedom, no room to grow and change, nothing entirley of their own, of a Big Brother type God/Church who sees everything. It is an ideology of no escape, which we see several characters- most notably the tragic Sebastian- struggling against. It is a condemnation of the stranglehold that the Church places on human beings, or being human at all. It is the Church, in the end, despite all the helping factors of society, the past, the changing-too-fast present, that ultimately destroys the hopes and dreams of all the main characters. Charles, Sebastian, Julia, Lord Marchmain, Lady Marchmain, all of them. They cannot escape it. Not even Charles, who isn't even a Catholic, but is merely in love with this family infused with it. One of the most constant questions by Charles is, "Do you always talk about religion so much?" or "Why bring God into it?" totally uncomphrending that the family can't get God /out/ of anything. Lady Marchmain stands in for God on Earth, while Sebastian is the hugely flawed Christ character. He's actually something of a cross between Christ and a Drowning Ophelia, but really, in terms of action, is there much difference? Especially since Sebastian is really a Christ of the Jesus in the Garden variety, that is of the "let this cup pass from me," variety. It is said over and over again that he has a calling, that he is holy yet rather heathen, and even he ends up in the embrace of the Church. A pathetic embrace it may be, yet he ends in serving it despite whatever he might have willed or tried to forget through his drunkenness and wandering. Sebastian is the most heartbreakingly beautiful pieces of the story, though he fades out of view in the second half. He still manages to drive the motion, to keep Charles' reluctant love.In the way all the characters end and the total presence of belief, despite not wanting to, I was reminded very strongly of Graham Greene. He made a lot of similiar points (if perhaps more passionately) in The End of the Affair. The final cry of, "God, just leave me alone!" at the end of that novel is echoed on page after page here. I do think that it is done better and with more finesse by Greene, but I will grant that Waugh had a lot more to deal with and probably had to be a bit more crude on this topic.I should also probably mention that there is a very strong homosexual element to the story. Charles spends the first half of the book in love with Sebastian, and the second half chasing the shade of him, his sister Julia. It is presented as a platonic love (at least Waugh mentions nothing about them actually having sex) but nonetheless an obsessive one. He does deal in rather surprisingly explicit detail with other gay relationships in the person of Anthony Blanche, Sebastian's German lover, etc. They even visit gay clubs and there is a lot of very open talk about people being gay. I was surprised by that in a novel published almost 50 years ago, especially one with such a strong Catholic element to it. A lot of people's sexuality is questionable, and the idea of being in love with a person, an idea, more than being sexually attracted to either gender is brought up again and again. Rather progressive for its time, I thought.... okay, I've rather rambled on, haven't I? In sum, very well written, epic, handles a lot more than one would think it could, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Though, I won't lie, being an anglophile helps to get you through the slower bits and through the rolling your eyes at the cheesy Romanticism and crazy Ophelia characters.Right. Really done now!
What do You think about Brideshead Revisited (1982)?
Two totally separate, virtually unrelated books with over-the-top narration and no arc. Brideshead Revisited is divided into two books that take place ten years apart from each other. The narrator/main character is almost unrecognizable from one to the other, and no real explanation is given. Is a simpering fool in the first book, and a cold jerk in the second. His main obsession in the first book is almost entirely and perfunctorily absent from the second, and vice versa with his obsession from the second.The writing is laughably intense and painfully overworked. This can work as a device to indicate an important trait of the first person narrator (see Lolita), but here it was clearly Waugh talking and not Ryder.Most annoyingly the climax revolves around a character that is hardly in any other part of the book and the final confrontation between the two main characters limps uninterestingly and flacidly to a point that likely didn't need making.I understand this is one of the best books ever written. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe the portrayal of life at the time is incredibly accurate and probing. Maybe the way he weaves his absurdly overdrawn paragraphs is seen as revolutionary and impressive. Maybe his ability to make his characters change without any explanation or without making the reader care was thought to be one-of-a-kind.Whatever, critics.
—Joe
This is a thinking book. Initially my first reaction, upon completing the book, was this: "What a bunch of assholes."After further reflection, I stand by that statement, but I can see how each of the characters was flawed, and how the individual failings of each character were exacerbated by relationships with the others'. For me, most of the book seemed to be an attack on Catholicism, which caused so many rifts in the Flyte family. Throughout, both Sebastian and Julia struggle so much against their faith, but then turn to it in times of crisis--even make sacrifices for it when required to do so. I've read that this is Waugh's ode to Catholicism, but it's not a great one, if it is. The main message seems to be something like, "Run as much as you want, you can't get away from me!" Me meaning Catholicism. I'm pretty sure that's not the way to get people to convert or to ... revert (?). Each of the main characters, at one time or another, seem to have disconnected, from life, from family, even from themselves. It's hard to believe they have any emotional depth at all; they've suppressed any humanity they may have had. There could be any number of reasons for this: deterioration of the class system, family ruptures, loss of faith, inability to face reality, resistance to maturity. I'm not saying they're good reasons, or justifiable reasons; in fact, most of them are things that everyone experiences, but we all seem to get through it.That Charles Ryder maintained contact with the Flytes is to his credit; I would have ignored them altogether after having been thrown out of their house. I wonder, though, if his interest came out of genuine affection or out of pity for them. Ultimately, he was just the little boy plugging the dike with his thumb; they were too intent on orchestrating their own destruction to let Charles help them. Thanks to K.K. for helping me out with Catholicism questions.
—April
