| Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder | |
Brideshead Revisited, 1945 first UK edition. |
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| Author | Evelyn Waugh |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Chapman and Hall |
| Publication date | 1945 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | NA |
Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. Waugh wrote that the novel "deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself". This is achieved by an examination of the aristocratic Marchmain family, as seen by the narrator, Charles Ryder.
Time Magazine included Brideshead Revisited in its list of "All-time 100 Novels". In various letters, Waugh himself refers to the novel a number of times as his "magnum opus"; however, in 1950 he wrote to Graham Greene saying "I re-read Brideshead Revisited and was appalled." In Waugh's preface to the 1959 revised edition of Brideshead the author explains the circumstances in which the novel was written, in the six months between December 1944 and June 1945 following a minor parachute accident. He is mildly disparaging of the novel, saying; "It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the period of soya beans and Basic English — and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful."
Brideshead Revisited was brought to the screen in the ITV drama serialisation of 1981, produced by Granada Television. A film adaptation of the book was released in July 2008.
Contents |
1923: After an unpleasant chance first encounter, protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder, a student at Hertford College, Oxford University, and Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of an aristocratic family and himself an undergraduate at Christ Church, become friends. Sebastian takes Charles to his family's palatial home, Brideshead, where Charles eventually meets the rest of Sebastian's family, including his sister Julia.
During the holiday Charles returns home, where he lives with his widower father. Scenes between Charles and his father Ned (Edward) provide some of the best-known comic scenes in the novel. He is called back to Brideshead after Sebastian incurs a minor injury. Sebastian and Charles spend the remainder of the summer together. They form something between a friendship and a romance. Waugh writes that Charles had been "in search of love in those days" when he first met Sebastian, finding "that low door in the wall... which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden", a metaphor that informs the work on a number of levels.
Sebastian's family is Catholic, which influences the Marchmain's lives as well as the content of their conversations, all of which surprises Charles, who had always assumed Christianity to be "without substance or merit". Lord Marchmain had converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism in order to marry his wife but soon escaped both his marriage and religion to Italy. Left alone, Lady Marchmain focused even more on her faith, which is also very much espoused by her oldest son, Bridey, and her youngest daughter, Cordelia. Sebastian, in some ways a troubled young man, learns to find greater solace in alcohol than in religion, and descends into that habit, drifting away from the family over a two-year period. Sebastian flees to Morocco, where his alcoholism ruins his health. He eventually finds some solace as an under-porter/charity case at a Tunisian monastery.
Sebastian's drifting leads to Charles' own estrangement from the Marchmains. Yet Charles is fated to re-encounter the Marchmain family over the years. He marries and fathers two children but his wife is unfaithful and he eventually forms a relationship with Julia, who by that time is married but separated from the wealthy but uncouth Canadian entrepreneur, Rex Mottram.
Both Charles and Julia plan to divorce their respective spouses so that they can marry. On the eve of World War II, the aging Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead in order to die in his ancestral home. As he names Julia (and not his oldest son Bridey) heir of the estate, this would give Charles marital ownership of the house. Lord Marchmain's deathbed return to the faith in late-July 1939 changes the situation: after this Julia decides that she cannot enter a sinful marriage with Charles, who is also moved by Lord Marchmain's reception of the sacraments.
The plot concludes in the early Spring of 1943 (or possibly 1944 – the date is disputed)[1]. Charles is "homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless"[2]. He is now an army officer after establishing a career as an architectural artist, and finds himself unexpectedly housed at Brideshead. Charles finds the house damaged by the military occupation but the house chapel, closed after Lady Marchmain's death in 1926, has been reopened for the soldiers' worship. It occurs to him that the chapel (and, by extension, the Church's) builders' efforts were not in vain, even when their purposes may appear, for a time, to be frustrated[3].
Taking into account the background of the author, the most significant theme of the book is Catholicism. Evelyn Waugh was a convert to Catholicism and the book is considered to be an attempt to express the Catholic faith in secular literary form. Waugh wrote to his literary agent A. D. Peters, "I hope the last conversation with Cordelia gives the theological clue. The whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that the theologians won't recognise it." Considering his readership, who were generally urbane and cosmopolitan, a sentimental or a didactic approach would not have worked. Sentimentalism would have cheapened the story while didacticism would have repelled a secular audience through excessive sermonising. Instead, the book brings the reader, through the narration of the agnostic Charles Ryder, in contact with the severely flawed but deeply Catholic Marchmain family. While many novels of the same era portray Catholics as the flatfooted people put on the spot by brilliant non-believers, Brideshead Revisited turns the table on the agnostic Charles Ryder (and presumably the reader as well) and scrutinises his secular values, which are tacitly portrayed to fall short of the deeper humanity and spirituality of the Catholic faith.
The Catholic themes of divine grace and reconciliation are pervasive in the book. Most of the major characters undergo a conversion in some way or another. Lord Marchmain, a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, who lived as an adulterer, is reconciled with the Church on his deathbed. Julia, who is involved in an extramarital affair with Charles, comes to feel this relationship is immoral and decides to separate from Charles in spite of her great attachment to him. Sebastian, the charming and flamboyant alcoholic, ends up in service to a monastery while struggling against his alcoholism. Even Cordelia has some sort of conversion: from being the sexiest schoolgirl her headmistress has ever seen, to serving in the hospital bunks of the Spanish Civil War. Most significant is Charles's apparent conversion, which is expressed very subtly (otherwise, it would have been sentimental); at the end of the book, set more than 20 years after his first meeting Sebastian, Charles kneels down in front of the tabernacle of the Brideshead chapel and says a prayer, "an ancient, newly learned form of words" — implying recent instruction in the catechism. Waugh speaks of his belief in grace in a letter to Lady Mary Lygon: "I believe that everyone in his (or her) life has the moment when he is open to Divine Grace. It's there, of course, for the asking all the time, but human lives are so planned that usually there's a particular time — sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed — when all resistance is down and Grace can come flooding in." Waugh uses a quote from a short story by G. K. Chesterton to illustrate the nature of Grace. Cordelia, in conversation with Charles Ryder, quotes a passage from the Father Brown detective story "The Queer Feet:" "I caught him, 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."[4] This illustrates how the hand of God works invisibly in each person's life, allowing him his free will until he is ready to respond to Grace, at which point God will intervene in his life. Aside from Grace and Reconciliation, other Catholic themes in the book are the Communion of Saints, Faith and Vocation.
The same themes were criticised by Waugh's contemporaries. Henry Green, a fellow novelist, wrote to Waugh, "The end was not for me. As you can imagine my heart was in my mouth all through the deathbed scene, hoping against hope that the old man would not give way, that is, take the course he eventually did." And Edmund Wilson, who had praised Waugh as the hope of the English novel, wrote "The last scenes are extravagantly absurd, with an absurdity that would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not — painful to say — meant quite seriously."
The Marchmain family, to some, is a symbol of a dying breed — the English nobility. One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age," and, referring to the deaths of Lady Marchmain's brothers in the Great War, "these men must die to make a world for Hooper ... so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures." This is viewed by some as elitism. According to Martin Amis, the book "squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly."[5]
The novel, while hardly pro-appeasement, is deeply cynical about the 'Churchillian' party inside the Conservatives. Rex Mottram, a deeply unsympathetic character, is portrayed as flirting with the ideas of Oswald Mosley before joining the anti-appeasement lobby (Winston Churchill admired Mussolini before leading the anti-appeasement party). The impression is left that anti-appeasement is merely a tactical choice of charlatans and opportunists looking for a means of political advancement.
The precise nature of Charles and Sebastian's relationship remains a topic of considerable debate; are they simply close friends, or does Waugh mean to imply a physical relationship between the characters?[6] Given that much of the first half of the novel circles around the initial encounter, friendship, and falling-away of these central characters, this issue continues to pique the curiosity of readers.
A frequent interpretation is that Charles and Sebastian had a passionate yet platonic relationship, an immature albeit strongly felt attachment that prefigures future heterosexual relationships. Indeed Cara, Lord Marchmain's mistress, says as much to Charles in the context of the novel itself—that his relationship with Sebastian forms part in a process of emotional development "typical to the English and the Germans". Waugh himself said that "Charles's romantic affection for Sebastian is part due to the glitter of the new world Sebastian represents, part to the protective feeling of a strong towards a weak character, and part a foreshadowing of the love for Julia which is to be the consuming passion of his mature years."
Others draw an alternative conclusion from the line "naughtiness high on the catalogue of grave sins." Reference is made at one point to Charles' impatiently anticipating Sebastian's letters in the manner of one who is love-smitten. Also, it is hinted in the book that one of the reasons why Charles is in love with Julia is because of the similarity between her and Sebastian. Indeed, when asked by Julia if he loved Sebastian, Charles replies; 'Oh yes! He was the forerunner.'
A fragment about the young Charles Ryder entitled Charles Ryder's Schooldays was found after Waugh's death, and is available in collections of Waugh's short works.
Brideshead Regained, Continuing the Memoirs of Charles Ryder by Michael Johnston was published in 2003 by akanos. The book deals with Ryder's career as a war artist and his subsequent reunion with the major characters from Brideshead Revisited. Currently the book's legal status is in dispute and the sequel is unauthorised by the estate of Evelyn Waugh with sales limited to certain Internet sites.
Brideshead Revisited has been referenced on television a few times, such as on Frasier. In the Family Guy episode "The Story on Page One," Stewie compares Brown University to Brideshead Revisited." In the film Dear Wendy, the Dandies congratulate one another with what they refer to as a "Brideshead stutter."
In scene 2 of Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia, one character refers to another character who attends Oxford as "Brideshead Regurgitated." Stoppard's phrase may have been inspired by the 1980s BBC comedy series "Three of a Kind", starring Tracey Ullman, Lenny Henry and David Copperfield, which featured a recurring sketch entitled "Brideshead Regurgitated", with Lenny Henry in the role of Charles Ryder. Et in Arcadia ego, the Latin phrase which is the title of the first chapter of Brideshead Revisited, is also a central theme to Tom Stoppard's play.
In the early 1980's, following the release of the television series, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (from 1983, Australian Broadcasting Corporation) produced a radio show called 'Brunswick Heads Revisited'. Brunswick Heads is a coastal town in northern New South Wales. The series was a spoof, and made fun of the 'Englishness' of Brideshead and many amusing parallels could be drawn between the upper class characters from Brideshead and their opposite numbers from rural Australia.