This is the sixth and last post on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
You
can find Post #1 here.
Post
#2 here.
Post
#3 here.
Post
#4 here.
Post #5 here.
My final Goodreads review.
I’m torn between four and a half and five stars. I rounded to five. Waugh’s gorgeous prose is the deciding factor.
What is this novel about? 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. At first 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, as many dramatizations of this novel seem to imply, an 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 time 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.
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Some really fine excerpts to highlight Evelyn Waugh’s beautiful prose.
Form the Prologue, the opening paragraphs:
When I reached “C”
Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at
the camp, just coming into full view below me through the gray mist of early
morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the
place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had
reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never
feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single
happy memory for me.
Here love had died
between me and the Army.
Here the tram lines
ended, so that men returning fuddled from Glasgow could doze in their seats
until roused by their journey’s end. There was some way to go from the
tram-stop to the camp gates; quarter of a mile in which they could button their
blouses and straighten their caps before passing the guard-room, quarter of a
mile in which concrete gave place to grass at the road’s edge. This was the
extreme limit of the city. Here the close, homogeneous territory of housing
estates and cinemas ended and the hinterland began. (p. 2-3)
From Book 1, Chapter 1, Chares and Sebastian drive out to the country.
At Swindon we turned off
the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and
ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the
car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the
shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries
and drank the wine—as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together—and we
lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the
leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-gray smoke rose, untroubled
by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the
tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the
sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold
us suspended.
“Just the place to bury a
crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in
every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and
miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.” (p. 24-25)
From
Book 1, Chapter 2, Charles looking back at his first year at Oxford.
In the event, that Easter
vacation formed a short stretch of level road in the precipitous descent of
which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It seems to me that I grew younger
daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and
a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard
bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the
school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer
term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of
what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts
and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave
sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short
of the joy of innocence. At the end of the term I took my first schools; it was
necessary to pass, if I was to remain at Oxford, and pass I did, after a week
in which I forbade Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced
black coffee and charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. I
remember no syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient lore which I
acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour. “I like
this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon”; that was enough then. Is
more needed now? (p. 47-48)
From
Book 1, Chapter 4, Charles reflecting on his summer with Sebastian.
The languor of Youth—how
unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The
zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional
attributes of Youth—all save this—come and go with us through life. These
things are a part of life itself; but languor—the relaxation of yet unwearied
sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding—that belongs to Youth alone and
dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such
compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision
itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate,
believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead. (p.
87)
From
Book 2, Chapter 2, Charles becomes infatuated with Julia.
That night and the night
after and the night after, wherever she went, always in her own little circle
of intimates, she brought a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on
the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flares across the water.
This was the creature,
neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening,
untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on
the cool edge of life; one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the
heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only
to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to
open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who
would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.
She had no interest in me
that evening; the jinn rumbled below us uncalled; she lived apart in a little
world, within a little world, the innermost of a system of concentric spheres,
like the ivory balls laboriously carved in China; a little problem troubling
her mind—little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols. She was wondering,
dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry. Thus
strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of colored chalk,
contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside
the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf past, present, and
future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of
both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew
nothing of war. (p. 207-208)
From
Book 3, Chapter 1, Charles reflects on his ten years since last at Brideshead.
My theme is memory, that
winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time.
These memories, which are
my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me.
Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in
pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking,
rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood
still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment,
with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky
above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time.
For nearly ten dead years
after that evening with Cordelia I was borne along a road outwardly full of
change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my
painting—and that at longer and longer intervals—did I come alive as I had been
during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not
life, that I was losing. My work upheld me, for I had chosen to do what I could
do well, did better daily, and liked doing; incidentally it was something which
no one else at that time was attempting to do. I became an architectural
painter. (p. 260-261)
From
Book 3, Chapter 3, Charles reflects on his two year relationship with Julia.
It had been an afternoon
of low cloud and summer squalls, so overcast that at times I had stopped work
and roused Julia from the light trance in which she sat—she had sat so often; I
never tired of painting her, forever finding in her new wealth and delicacy—until
at length we had gone early to our baths and, on coming down, dressed for
dinner, in the last half-hour of the day, we found the world transformed; the
sun had emerged; the wind had fallen to a soft breeze which gently stirred the
blossom in the limes and carried its fragrance, fresh from the late rains, to
merge with the sweet breath of box and the drying stone. The shadow of the
obelisk spanned the terrace.
I had carried two garden
cushions from the shelter of the colonnade and put them on the rim of the
fountain. There Julia sat, in a tight little gold tunic and a white gown, one
hand in the water idly turning an emerald ring to catch the fire of the sunset;
the carved animals mounted over her dark head in a cumulus of green moss and
glowing stone and dense shadow, and the waters round them flashed and bubbled
and broke into scattered flames. (p.
318-319)
From
Book 3, Chapter 5, Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead.
Julia gave a little sigh
of surprise and touched my hand. We had seen him nine months ago at Monte
Carlo, when he had been an upright and stately figure, little changed from when
I first met him in Venice. Now he was an old man. Plender had told us his
master had been unwell lately: he had not prepared us for this.
Lord Marchmain stood
bowed and shrunken, weighed down by his great-coat, a white muffler fluttering
untidily at his throat, a cloth cap pulled low on his forehead, his face white
and lined, his nose colored by the cold; the tears which gathered in his eyes
came not from emotion but from the east wind; he breathed heavily. Cara tucked
in the end of his muffler and whispered something to him. He raised a gloved
hand—a schoolboy’s glove of gray wool—and made a small, weary gesture of
greeting to the group at the door; then, very slowly, with his eyes on the
ground before him, he made his way into the house.
They took off his coat
and cap and muffler and the kind of leather jerkin which he wore under them;
thus stripped he seemed more than ever wasted but more elegant; he had cast the
shabbiness of extreme fatigue. Cara straightened his tie; he wiped his eyes
with a bandanna handkerchief and shuffled with his stick to the hall fire.
There was a little
heraldic chair by the chimney-piece, one of a set which stood against the
walls, a little, inhospitable, flat-seated thing, a mere excuse for the
elaborate armorial painting on its back, on which, perhaps, no one, not even a
weary footman, had ever sat since it was made; there Lord Marchmain sat and
wiped his eyes. (p. 364-365)
From
the Epilogue, Charles goes to the chapel to pray, the final lines of the novel.
There was one part of the
house I had not yet visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed no
ill-effects of its long neglect; the art-nouveau paint was as fresh and bright
as ever; the art-nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a
prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words, and left, turning towards the
camp; and as I walked back, and the cook-house bugle sounded ahead of me, I
thought:
“The builders did not
know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the
stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they
enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park
grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was
desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
“And yet,” I thought,
stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had
taken up the second call and were sounding “Pick-em-up, pick-em-up, hot
potatoes,” “and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it
is a dead word from ten years back.
“Something quite remote
from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the
fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought
about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design
relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old
knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again
for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem.
It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I
found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”
I quickened my pace and
reached the hut which served us for our ante-room.
“You’re looking unusually
cheerful today,” said the second-in-command.
(p. 408-410)
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