Brideshead Revisited felt like a book written especially for me. I, after all, was raised a Catholic, in a family with some not insubstantial but nevertheless declining wealth, went to a boys’ boarding school and then Oxbridge, and have to deal with the consequences of all of the above every day. The novel is in the form of a memoir by a man called Charles Ryder, of his relationship with another family, the Flytes, in particular the eldest daughter Julia and the younger son, Lord Sebastian. Advertised on the blurb as an Oxford novel, Oxford is only a small part of the larger story. That story concerns first, Sebastian’s attempts to escape from his family and their religion; then Charles’ relationship with Julia, herself somewhat lapsed in faith.
I always find talking about novels hard; the longer they are, the worse it becomes. We have to latch onto themes, but often the effects are lost when we work with brief summaries. If not themes, we just choose characters, but that too feels cheap and misleading. I loved this novel and think I will end up rereading it many times, but when I say it was written for me it’s not some attempt at placing myself on a pedestal – what I mean is that I don’t think, had I different background, I would have got nearly so much out of the book. One must know firsthand the family dynamics, the experiences, the guilt of class and religion. And to be quite honest, I am not sure I would wish them on anybody.
Sebastian – and his Drinking
I ought to begin with Sebastian, Lord Flyte, and his story. He has a somewhat dandyish reputation at Oxford, and carries around with him a little bear, Aloysius – whether as a stunt, or because of a deep immaturity, we are not to know outright. He meets Charles when, after a night out, he vomits through Charles’ open window onto the carpet. They become friends, and he inducts Charles into a world of wastefulness and fun. Charles is what we might call well-off, but he’s not like Lord Flyte, whose elder brother is the Earl of Brideshead, the family home.
These are important gradations within the British class system that still exist, but they are invisible unless you get close enough to them. For plenty of people, I am the poshest person they know. But my family are nouveau riche – we made our money in the 19th century through actual work. And my limited noble blood comes through my grandmother, not the male line. A friend gently rebuked me when we had lunch together and I acted as if we were in the same place. His family home has more old portraits than mine has plates, and the origins of their significance go much deeper into the past, and are nothing near as shameful as commerce. Money is a certain leveller, but in the end, it cannot get you onto a hunt unless you buy all the land the foxes live on. Whether or not you want to be a part of this club doesn’t change the fact that it still exists.
Charles and Sebastian do a lot of drinking and revelling, ultimately becoming good chums. Charles visits Sebastian’s home, but Sebastian tries hard to prevent him from meeting anyone from his family. When that happens, all the happiness that had built up, and all the humour of the novel’s first part, collapses. The drinking, which at first is as harmless as it can be (“I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon”), soon becomes mildly concerning (““Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning”) and then outright depressing (“I found that sometimes after I had gone back to my college, he sat up late and alone, soaking”).
It only gets worse. Sebastian’s name is undoubtedly a pun. Lord Flyte wishes for his own flight. We get variations, from characters, on what is wrong with him. At one point he accuses Charles of spying on him for his mother. But, regardless, his drinking becomes worse and worse, and he tries to flee home, running away to get drunk on Christmas, and eventually leaving for Morocco, where he lives a little like how drug addicts are today portrayed, although with enough money arriving each month for him to support himself. He wants to get away. “He must feel free”, as one character ambiguously puts it.
The treatment of alcoholism within Brideshead Revisited was one of the ways the novel hit close to home. When I was about 10, I started having attacks of depression, almost on a termly basis, at school. They came from the most ridiculous source, for a boy at that age – the thought I was failing to live up to the family name, which had been so honoured by my famous grandfather and great-grandfather. I used to go up to the board in the form room when nobody else was about and try to analyse how I was performing within the class, to see whether I was the best, or whether I was not trying hard enough. I grew out of the feeling, not the depression. But pressures, of a certain sort, have always been there, even when we try to avoid them.
Language and Silence
One of the reasons why we lived on a remote estate in Scotland, I think it’s fair to say, is that my father wanted to flee too. With the sale of a painting he’d inherited, he had enough money to buy the estate and become a farmer. But he, like Sebastian, was an alcoholic in his flight and before it. As with Sebastian’s home, I know that at my grandmother’s there is a drinks tray available for whoever wants it. As with my own family, the attitude towards Sebastian’s drinking is utterly repulsive. And we see this in the novel’s use of dialogue and other language, which brings us onto the next topic. Here is what Julia has to say when she hears of her brother’s plight:
“He’s been drinking in his room all the afternoon” “How very peculiar! What a bore he is! Will he be all right for dinner?”
The older brother remarks that God loves drunkards. The fact that they all got drunk enough to be arrested and put in the papers is a matter of amusement to the younger sister, Cordelia, who is admittedly only a child at this point. It takes a long time for the drinks tray and cabinet to be locked away. As so often happens, the approach taken denies the problem exists at all. “Then dinner was announced, and we went to the dining room where the subject was not mentioned.”
In front of the servants, nowadays more respectfully called “staff”, you are not supposed to talk about such things. But then, nobody wants to talk about them anywhere else. “Sebastian’s stay here has not been happy” is all his mother writes to Charles in a letter, but it tells us more than enough – and not just about him. Silences and evasive language mark the upper classes who are here the centre of the story. Because they barely even acknowledge that Charles is unhappy, they cannot get much into working out why he is or what to do about it. Even the solution proposed at one point, to remove all drink from his access, is itself a concealment. If there’s no drink, he cannot be drunk, and hence we cannot say that we have a problem on our hands.
The language of the novel can be very funny too – Waugh’s reputation these days is primarily as a comic novelist – but what sticks out is the way that it stops being quite so funny once people start getting hurt. One of the very impressive things about the novel is the way that it manages to transition from being essentially a comic novel set in Oxford, into something much more tragic, almost without you noticing. A character like Charles’ eccentric father, who we meet early on, is quite funny, but the characters who take centre stage afterwards, who are just as out of touch or backward, are anything but. Their inability to face things hurts people, Sebastian most of all. It takes a doctor in Morocco to say the quiet part out loud, that Sebastian is an “alcoholic”. Nobody else seems to know the word.
Silences don’t just tolerate alcohol abuse – they create other problems too. Most notably, they allow the family’s finances to flounder. It must be said, it’s rather hard not to let your finances fail when you are in the position that the owners of Brideshead are. Away from the world, away from the management of your funds, even if you have reasonably good advisors, you may not know what options you have. That, more or less, is the view of Rex Mottram. This Canadian financier is up-and-coming and marries Julia to keep up the upping. He talks of finances and figures, and for any obstacle he assumes money can resolve it. When confronted with the fact that he has divorced another woman who is still alive, and hence cannot remarry as a Catholic, his solution is rather simple. “All right then, I’ll get an annulment. What does it cost? Who do I get it from?” – his directness is a breath of fresh air. Except that the air stinks.
Catholicism
If we placed the characters of the novel on a chart spanning the earthly and the heavenly, Rex would be underground. Charles would be suspended in the air, Julia and Sebastian (the “half-heathens”) would be somewhat above him, and the rest of the Flytes except the absent father, much higher still. Rex is rough, determined, and brutally clear where the other characters take tangled paths even to say they need the loo. We might be inclined to side with him against the Flytes, but that’s not where the novel goes. I feel that, if the first thing we learn about Waugh is that he’s a comic novelist, near-enough the second is that he is a Catholic convert – so we know that Rex isn’t going to win. Still, it’s up to us to judge how far he loses.
“I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.”
That last line is so good you have to underline it. And it contains the whole argument, it seems, of the book. Whatever is left out is contained in this quote from on G K Chesterton’s character, Father Brown.
“”Father Brown” said something like “I caught him” (the thief) “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.””
Charles is not a Catholic, while the Flytes are. Even Sebastian and Julia, the ones whose faith is weaker, still have a sense that the religion is true, even as they fail to live up to it. Charles is misunderstanding entirely when he says, “It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.” As an assertion, it rings true. The problem is that once you believe in the truth of the religion you were born with, even as you seek to turn your back on it, it is still your orientation point, even if you are orientating yourself away from it. “You know at heart that it’s all bosh, don’t you?” “How I wish it was!”
Waugh’s novel, whose goal according to the preface was to “show the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”, ultimately does just that. Everyone attempting to leave the whirlpool is carried back into it. Whatever the misery that it causes them, they also have much richer lives, internally at any rate, than Rex. And we get a sense that religion saves them in the end, from something truly horrible, even if it is only inside, only in their heads.
Even Charles himself is not living well, and he borrows Julia’s image of a part pretending to be a whole to describe himself later on in the novel. After Sebastian disappears to Morocco, time passes, but Charles’s life as a painter of increasing importance, his marriage and two children, ultimately receives little attention. “I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing.” But he was living more richly when he was with Sebastian and the Flytes, even though most of the time he was miserable. It’s that classic problem – meaningful misery or empty apparent contentment. Charles decides that his marriage and worldly success were not contentment after all, and his affair with Julia, herself in an unhappy marriage, brings the novel into its final section.
Convincing us that Julia and Sebastian return, in their ways, to the faith of their childhoods, is easy enough. But Waugh goes further, and his novel is sneakily the story of how Charles – a committed atheist – finds himself slipping into a position where faith becomes necessary. It all happens at the end, but it’s rather well done. Bizarrely, plenty of people on Goodreads seem to have missed it. Even the novel’s full title gives us a large, flashing clue: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. God left out the hook, and Charles unknowingly took it. And good for him.
Conclusion
For many of the rest of us, the novel’s ending will be immensely frustrating. Charles and Julia divorce their unfaithful partners to be with one another, but then come to accept that to do so would be to “live in sin”. And so, instead, they part out of deference to God and never see one another again. Their faith, it turns out, is mighty. But it makes for resignation and a denial of emotional satisfaction that is a real challenge to nonbelievers. I can imagine many of us will have thrown the book across the room in annoyance. But that’s faith for you. Though they do not set themselves on fire, in Brideshead Revisited we have people who make you feel they are serious about their beliefs. We can only accept that and close the door on their story without being too rude about them behind their backs.
For me, though I went to mass at school every week, and was raised moderately Catholic, I remain still some distance from Julia and Sebastian. I don’t see the same necessity as they do to act the way they do. But I am close enough that I could respect their decision, even if I thought it was ridiculous. Regardless, the ending is one of those brilliant ones which will change with us as we grow ourselves, a bit like the end of Wharton’s Age of Innocence (another book with a challenging ending). Though I did not need yet another excuse to want to re-read it, there’s one right there for you.