This is the fifth post on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
You
can find Post #1 here.
Post
#2 here.
Post
#3 here.
Post #4 here.
Book
3, Chapter 2
Charles has his gallery exhibition in London. Meanwhile he furtively conducts an affair with Julia. Anthony Blanche shows up at the exhibition, and he and Charles go out to a gay bar for lunch where Anthony is completely honest and tells Charles his paintings are charming but completely uninspired. Meanwhile the international crises which will culminate into WWII occur in the background, involving Rex. Charles and Julia are deeply in love.
Book
3, Chapter 3
It is two years later, and Charles and Julia have continued their affair, are very much in love, and it has become common knowledge, even to their respective spouses, that the two are a committed couple. At dinner with Bridey one evening, Bridey tells them he is engaged to be married to a middle-aged woman, a widow and devout Catholic with three children. He also tells Julia that he cannot bring Beryl to meet them at Brideshead because of the adulterous affair that is manifest to all between Charles and Julia. Julia breaks into a fit of tearful hysteria, not over Bridey’s rudeness, but over its truth of her living in sin.
Book
3, Chapter 4
The two divorces are in process without the two opposite spouses offering much resistance. Julia meets Beryl and finds her a bit different than Bridey described. All the while the political and international events are coagulating into what will become the Second World War. In November Cordelia returns home from serving as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. We learn that she had tried and left a convent, and has now dedicated her life to service. While in Spain she heard that Sebastian was ill, and so took a trip over to Tunis where Sebastian resides at a monastery. She nursed him and learned of his life: seven years with Kurt, mostly together in Greece and then Germany, where Kurt was arrested and ultimately killed himself. Sebastian went back to Morocco and then to Tunis at the monastery where the monks reluctantly took in the alcoholic. There he lives a holy life despite the alcohol. Cordelia speculates that he will eventually die there because of his deteriorating health.
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Book
3, Chapter 5
As the two divorces make their way through the courts, as the international situation continues to reach a crises, Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead in January of 1939 for what is surely his final months of life. He is ready to hand over the property to his eldest son, but upon meeting Bridey’s new wife he is so revolted that he changes his will and leaves it to Julia. By Easter Lord Marchmain’s health has significantly deteriorated, and the three children against protestation from Charles bring in a priest, Fr. Mackay, to give Marchmain last rites. To everyone’s embarrassment, Marchmain dismisses the priest summarily. By mid-July Marchmain is near death. Julia brings back Fr. Mackay, who asks for a sign of repentance from Marchmain, and with his last strength makes the sign of the cross. A few hours later, Marchmain dies. Through the giving of last rites, Charles has suddenly become a believer. Julia too has experienced grace of returning to faith, and tells Charles that, despite her deep love for him, she cannot marry him.
Epilogue
Charles returns to the scene of the Prologue as soldier entering Brisdeshead as a place to quarter his company. As Charles surveys the house, he notices the damages done by soldiers of other companies quartered there, including damage to his artwork, all of which culminates to a shameful disrespect for the estimable manor. Nanny Hawkins still is upstairs, and Charles sits and has tea with her, talking of what’s become of the Brideshead family. Bridey, Julia, and Cordelia have all ended up in Palestine. Finally Charles enters the chapel, which has been restored, the red sanctuary lamp now lit, kneels, and prays.
###
I can’t help feeling that the central, controlling concept of the novel is displacement. There is in the novel the displacement of Edwardian England by the force of the First World War. We see this through the lives of Lord and Lady Marchmain, Charles’ father, and the deaths of Lady Marchmain’s brothers. There is the displacement of inter war England by the Second World War. Lives are displaced, Charles enters the army, and Brideshead castle is damaged and the furniture is packed away upstairs. There is the displacement of the upper classes as middle and lower classes gain in status. We see this in Hooper and Mottram. And there is the displacement of something in each of the main characters which fractures their sense of being.
For Sebastian, the displacement seems to have occurred in childhood. Earlier in this discussion I gave it a sort of “psychological” connotation. What drives Sebastian is still psychological but not in the sense I meant it earlier. Earlier I seemed to be drawn to some sort of causal link between some event in his childhood that could be at the root of his unhappiness and alcoholism. Waugh even gives us possible suggestions for that causal link: a father who abandoned his family when Sebastian was a child, an overbearing mother, a Catholicism that constricts his freedom, fear of responsibility, which is akin to fear of growing up, and perhaps unfulfilled homosexual desire. Now it may be all of these things or it may be none. The novel is not intended to be that kind of psychological examination. The mystery of Sabastian’s nature leads the reader to try to solve the mystery, but Waugh makes sure it’s unsolvable. What the reader is left with is the fact of displacement from a happy, Edenic time to a fallen state. This is still psychology—all studies of human nature must involve psychology (there was psychology as early as in the writing of Homer’s Iliad; there’s psychology in Adam and Eve)—but not as we think of psychology in the 20th century sense. Call this displacement, Catholic psychology.
For Charles his Edenic moment is in that summer with Sebastian at Brideshead. It is at this moment he feels the near freedom of adulthood but still the wonder of a boy. He explores a beautiful world, lives an epicurean life-style, and shares Sebastian’s friendship, a friendship based on mutual love. Though they are a bit older than just mere boys, I’m convinced their friendship and love is boyish and platonic. It would have to be for the novel to make sense. Though not everything they do is holy, such friendship is ultimately holy, a grace that works in their hearts.
And then a displacement comes. Sebastian sinks into alcoholism. He cannot bear to live with his family. Perhaps boyhood ends. Perhaps pubescent longings mature into sex drives. Perhaps the responsibility of adulthood—the responsibility that led Lady Marchmain’s brothers to die in WWI—pulls Sebastian and Charles away from that love. But a displacement occurs. Sebastian leaves England altogether and Charles becomes a semi-famous though mediocre painter.
Such displacement leaves a hole in their being. They try to fill it. Sebastian with alcohol and a needy lover. Charles with his work, lovers, a wife, and an affair. Displacement incurs a longing to return. His affair with Julia, who happens to look very much like Sebastian, is an attempt to return to that holy love of that first Brideshead summer. Sebastian was “the first” not because there was sex involved but because with Sebastian Charles had found holy love. Julia too has her own displacement. She finds grace in her young womanhood. She wants to marry Catholic, but the events of life just displace her away from that. In the midst of their affair, Julia asks Charles if he had forgotten Sebastian and Charles tells her, “He was a forerunner.” And then Charles thinks about that, contemplates it deeply.
“Perhaps,” I thought,
while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke—a
thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace—“perhaps all our loves
are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and
paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps
you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs
from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other,
snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a
pace or two ahead of us.” I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily
in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian
days. (p. 349)
That thought is at the heart of the narrative. Let me complete his thought in this way: “Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols” of a greater love of a distant home where we were as full of our being as God created us to be. That's what I think he means in direct prose. Call that place heaven, our true home, and call our journey in this life a striving to return, a journey to return to heaven, to return to our full being, a return to our true home. The name of the novel even provides an association of it: Brideshead > Bridegroom > Christ > Heaven. Revisited > Return > Home. The novel is a return to Brideshead, which is a return to home, a home with all the pregnant meaning that Waugh has put into it. This is why nostalgia figures so in the novel. It is a longing to go home.
It is no coincidence, then, that the novel’s climax is with Lord Marchmain’s return to Brideshead. Having been displaced by the First World War, and subsequently self-displaced from his family and ancestral home, in the end he returns home. In one sense it completes the circle of his life, and, then having reconciled with God and his Catholic faith, he goes on to his eternal home. When he makes the sign of the cross, he fully returns home and the displacement of twenty-something years has been righted.
This longing to return home is the grace that works on all the characters. Allow me to paraphrase one of Jesus’s sayings: “If you make my word your home, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32). Displacement is the first experience when we are born. It is beyond our memory, but the sense of that memory remains. It is a memory of being loved, the mystery of being loved, which leads us to home in all its metaphorical senses. Remembering this sense of home leads us to a deeper longing, the longing to be complete. The sense of nostalgia is an inkling to a greater desire, the desire to be free and to reach our eternal home. This is what I think this novel is about.
###
My
Reply to Kerstin:
Kerstin
wrote: "Has Charles found peace in the end or a place for a new beginning?
He goes off to war and that's not very reassuring."
Well, he's certainly depressed but I have a hope that when it's all said and done, he and Julia will marry. From what I can tell I think annulments are valid for both their marriages. Now will Julia feel it is proper, I don't know. Maybe not. But Charles is Catholic now. Julia has returned to the faith. Sebastian has found holiness. Cordelia will be holy. Lord Marchmain is redeemed. Lady Marchmain is in heaven and hopefully reconciled with Sebastian and her husband. In time everyone's soul projects to be in heaven, though life on earth will entail suffering. It projects to be a happy ending.
My
Reply to Mark:
Mark
wrote: "Manny wrote: "he and Julia will marry."
Oh,
no, certainly not that. Apart from the fact that if it is not on the page it did
not happen, Julia refusing Charles is her choosing which world she is
t..."
Oh I realize it's not on
the page and it's all pure speculation, and really any version of speculation
goes against the author's wishes.
He ended the novel at a
point and that is that.
But to speculate, and
it's not from some romantic conviction I may have. Waugh invested about half
the novel in their relationship and then it falls apart in a dozen pages, maybe
less, from against the desires of both. It's not too far a leap to project and
speculate that the obstacles that prevent their union might be overcome.
Charles has become Catholic - which he wasn't when they split - and the war
will be over and Brideshead will return to normal and annulments are very
possible. After all the word "annulment" came up earlier in the
novel. It's planted there. It's not even a question of happiness. It's a
question of settling the chaos. Bringing order to an unsettled situation.
Revisited in the title is a return. Will the return end where the author leaves
it or is it not likely a return again will occur ahead in time?
After all the parallels suggest it. Lord Marchmain dies in the faith. Sebastian finds his holy sanctuary. Bridey his Catholic wife and family, Cordelia her charitable works. Order has settled on each of their situations. It's not that big a leap to project the same for Charles and Julia.
My
Reply to Mark:
Mark
wrote: "Waugh does not, like some earnestly evangelical Christian authors,
try to present the Catholic world as a place of good happy contented people
making good life decisions and saying their prayers. Rather, the Catholic world
is one of enchantment, one in which there is more to the world that what the
five senses can perceive."
I certainly agree with that. The only quibble I have is your word "enchantment." Is it enchantment or supernaturally charged? Your use of the word enchantment suggests that it is wonderful and heavenly and conducive to happiness. I think you brought up Tolkein as an allusion for Waugh's Catholic world view, and with that I can understand your use of the word enchantment. But I don't think Tolkein is Waugh's model for his Catholic world view. I think it's T.S. Eliot. In T. S. Eliot's Catholicism (yes, I know, Anglo-Catholicism) the world is supernaturally charged and that supernatural affects our psyche in a way that's just not there in Tolkein. At least from my reading of him. I think your use of "enchantment" leads you to minimize the psychology that is going on in the novel. I think T.S. Eliot's Catholicism fits better with the unhappiness of following one's Catholic faith fully. It's Tolkein who presents some happy shire and a Utopian existence.
My
Reply to Mark:
Mark
wrote: "If Waugh's vision here is open to criticism, I think it would be
that he bundled a set of specific aesthetics and social structures into his
vision of the Catholic world as if they were a necessary part of it. I think
there is some merit in that criticism, but at the same time, one could argue
that part of seeing the world whole is going to be the opportunity for a more
profound aesthetic experience. "
Yes it is open to criticism. Part of Waugh's vision of Catholicism it seems is inextricably linked to some medieval social structure of aristocrats and lower classes. You could say that comes from TS Eliot too. I assume the implication being the aristocracy have some sort of divine right to their place. Yes, there is a division in worldviews, but I would characterize it more as a feudal worldview (which to Waugh seems to be the Catholic worldview) in conflict with the capitalist/modern worldview of the rising middle classes which we see in Hooper and Mottram. No, I will have to disagree. I think displacement is a very apt term for the novel. The grace overcomes the displacements. The grace is operating to overcome displacement. That doesn't contradict Waugh
My
Comment:
One other thing I will
criticize Waugh for. After thinking about this for a while now, I think Waugh
believes alcoholic drinking is actually a grace. Remember I said his values on
drinking are not in line even with the society of his day, not to mention ours.
As I've thought about this, I think he really thinks the drinking is part of
the graces that flow from God. Perhaps he may even think of the drinking as a
sacramental. Just look over the novel and see how many times drinking an
alcoholic beverage is mentioned, and one has to be drunk from all the drinking
they do on those occasions. It's a lot of alcohol. Charles and Julia are
drinking champagne while the ship is pitching all over and everyone is seasick.
I think every chapter has alcohol in it. I think there is more to it than just
the surface drinking. I think Waugh intends drinking to be loaded with symbolic
meaning. Waugh was known to being a drinker and maybe an alcoholic too. I do
not think the Catholic Church sees drinking to the level of being drunk as a
grace.
My
Reply to Mark:
Mark
wrote: "This is a pattern that is repeated for many characters, and Waugh
announces the theme very explicitly when he has Lady Machmain read Chesterton's
Father Brown story with the line about a twitch upon the thread."
I see nothing of what I
speculated that would violate anything in that explanation of a "a twitch
upon the thread." You seem to forget or not address that Charles is now
Catholic. If Julia returned and got annulments - of which, again, was planted
earlier in the novel - then their marriage would be a Catholic marriage. The
twitch to return to Catholicism is not violated.
If Waugh intended to make
the point that Julia and Charles must go on for the rest of their earthly lives
carrying this cross (and he may well have intended that) then he should have shut the lid on all
possibilities. But as I have pointed out, he left the possibilities open. His
dramatic structure calls for the possibility and it would have been very easy
for him to end the novel with the situation categorically closed. If it was
important to him to make that point it would have been incumbent on him to do
so.
Was this a failure on Waugh's part? Few novels are perfect. I don't see Waugh as James Joyce or William Faulkner. He did not create perfection here. I tend to start with a work as perfect to the author's intent. But to paraphrase DH Lawrence, once a novel has left an author's hands, he no longer has a say. It's the novel itself that speaks. It's all speculation on what happens after, but the lid is not shut closed on a Charles and Julia uniting in a Catholic marriage.
My
Reply to Mark:
Mark
wrote: "This is a highly dissonant note. We instinctively want to think --
and so much inferior Christian literature is devoted to promoting the thought
-- that being in harmony with God means being in harmony with the world in this
life; that becoming Catholic will make you happy in this world. This is the
prosperity gospel, in short, and it is heretical. "Think not that I am
come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."
"Take up your cross and follow me.""
I said no such thing. I despise prosperity gospel. You keep thinking that is my point, and it is not.
My
Comment:
As it happened, yesterday
[September 13th] was the feast day of St. John Chrysostom and as I
was reading about him I found this perfectly suited quote:
“Let there be no
drunkenness; for wine is the work of God, but drunkenness is the work of the
devil. Wine makes not drunkenness; but intemperance produces it. Do not accuse
that which is the workmanship of God, but accuse the madness of a fellow mortal
… For what is more wretched than drunkenness! The drunken man is a living
corpse. Drunkenness is a demon self-chosen … ”
Waugh's later self criticism on this was warranted. And yes, I do enjoy a good drink myself. I am not a teetotaler
My
Reply to Mark:
Mark
wrote: ""Thus I come to the broken sentences which were the last
words spoken between Julia and me..."
Charles
never speaks to Julia again, therefore he certainly does not marry he."
It's first person
narration where Charles is speaking in 1943. We are speculating beyond the
ending of the narration. That is the current status as of 1943. It could not
imply a future status because Charles is not a soothsayer.
Well, we've both made our
points. I am not convinced by your reading and you are not convince by mine. We
actually agree more than you think. So be it. There's no point in pursuing this
further.
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