Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Post 4

This is the fourth post on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here.  

  

Book 2, Chapter 3

Part 1: Charles returns to London to join an anti-communist defense group to resist striking unionists.  In London he goes to a party where an American jazz band is playing and he meets up with Boy Mulcaster and Anthony Blanch.  Mulcaster is an exuberant member of the defense group, and Blanche inform him of what has happened to Sebastian.  Sebastian has become a complete “sot” and found his way to Fez, Morocco and taken up with a German who has intentionally shot his foot to get out of the French Foreign Legion.  Julia having heard Charles is in London summons him to ask him if he can go convince Sebastian to return to see Lady Marcmain before she dies.  Charles agrees.

Part 2: Charles flies out to Casablanca and takes a bus to Fez and makes his way to Sebastian’s house.  There he finds Kurt, Sebastian’s German friend, incapacitated because of his foot that won’t heal, who tells him Sebastian is sick in the hospital.  While attending to Sebastian at the hospital, they receive word that Lady Marchmain has died.  Charles sees Sebastian out of the hospital and back to his home to Kurt where Sebastian is quite satisfied spending his life taking care of Kurt.  Before Chales leaves he arranges Sebastian’s finances. 

Part 3: Back at Brideshead Charles tells Bridey of Sebastian.  Charles is informed that Marchmain House is to be destroyed and is given the commission to paint it, his first commission as an architectural painter.  Cordelia comes by to watch him and they spend dinner together, and Cordelia tells him she hopes she has the vocation to become a nun. 

 

Book 3 Chapter 1

Part 1: Charles brings us ten years ahead and relates the events of those ten years.  He has become a celebrated architectural painter, published several books, becoming world famous.  He has just come back from a two year trip to Mexico and Central America to be re-inspired.  He has come to New York City where his wife, Celia, has come to meet him for the leg back to England.  Charles learns he has had a daughter in his absence, supposedly attributed to him before he departed, and we learn Celia has cheated on him before and after he left for Mexico.  The marriage is still strained, though Celia tries to restart their life together.

Part 2: On board the ship happens to be Julia, who we later learn has come to New York for her own extramarital affair which has not ended well.  As the ship travels, a storm and incredibly rough ocean hits and nearly everyone on board is isolated in their cabins with seasickness.  Charles and Julia are two of the few passengers who do not get seasick, and over the course of three days of the ship pitching and rolling meet, discuss their sad marriages, and fall in love, culminating with a night sleeping together.  When the seas finally return to normal, Charles promises to meet Julia in London. 

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So what are we to make of Sebastian and Kurt?  I assume this proves Sebastian’s homosexuality.  If so, does that then mean that Charles and Sebastian in those Oxford years were homosexual lovers?  I think it puts my earlier thought that they were friends innocent of sexuality in doubt. 

However, it’s not conclusive either way.  It’s not even conclusive that Sebastian and Kurt are physical lovers.  Kurt has an infected foot that won’t heal and is in constant pain.  I would imagine that could make sexual activity difficult.  Still Sebastian’s attraction to men and lack of attraction to women confirms his homosexuality.

Why is Evelyn Waugh so reticent about the homosexuality?  Does he feel that in 1946 he can’t write openly about it?  And yet he is quite clear about Anthony Blanche’s homosexuality.  Why is he not constrained there? 

Though I am not as confident about it anymore, I still maintain that Sebastian and Charles’ relationship in the Oxford years is innocent and boyish. 

 

My Reply to Frances on Anthony Blanche’s sexual orientation.

You think that makes a difference as to how open Waugh would be about Sebastian and Charles' relationship? He doesn't have to be vividly explicit, but he has to make it clear, especially given that this is in first person narration. Otherwise I do think this is a failing on the novel. If it were third person, I might be a little more forgiving. But Charles is quite clear about his adultery. He has to be as clear on this too, though he doesn't have to be as explicit.

 

Cara, Lord Marchmain's mistress calls the Sebastian/Charles relationship innocent, even though she thinks there was a physical relationship. I have to stand by my comment 30 in the thread of Book 1, Chpaters 4 & 5. It is "a friendship that innocently extends to some sort of physical caress but short of cognizant sex." I have nothing else to go by. What choice do I have as a reader if Waugh doesn't make it clear? The novel would be flawed otherwise. I would rather think the novel is not flawed.

 

Irene Commented on the subject:

I am not trying to be provocative, but I am wondering why the question about any sexual interaction between Charles and Sebastian is important. We know that all these characters are flawed. We know that Sebastian has caused his family great pain by his abuse of alcohol. We know that Charles is not chased. We certainly do not know all the sins of every character. Charles does not narrate every event of his life, only those that will advance the story. So, how would knowing that Sebastian and Charles did or did not engage in some physical sexual behavior change the story? Would knowing that Sebastian was or was not homosexual alter our understanding of him as a character or our understanding of the novel?

 

My Reply to Irene:

You're not being provocative at all Irene. Those are very good questions. Here's my attempt at it on what I can think of now.

 

(1) From an aesthetic point of view, if a first person narrator is not being forthright, then there are implications. A first person novel is a creation of a world inside the narrator's head. Unless the author has an artistic reason for being disingenuous (I'm thinking of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier) then the creation of that world is suspect, the artistry marred, and the reader left with a sense of being cheated. It would be an artistic failing.

 

(2) The arc of the novel moves from a sense of innocence and joy to worldliness, malignancy, and squalor. Remember how Julia's plans for a wonderful wedding degenerates into what she calls "squalid." Every major character except Cordelia goes from joyous and happy to squalid as the novel progresses. Happy drink turns to alcoholism, happy marriages go to adulterous affairs and still born children, and so on. It is important to understand the theme to understand the nature of that innocence. We have to understand "the before" as well as "the after."

 

(3) So much of the novel depends on what is the root cause of Sebastian's unhappiness, or at least his need to be drunk.

Sebastian serves as the model of humanity which is reflected in the other characters. He is the mystery of which Waugh's understanding of human nature rests and is reflected in the other characters. If we knew that Sebastian was an alcoholic because of his homosexual urges in conflict with Catholicism, then our understanding of the novel is altered. Given that Catholicism is of such importance to the novel, this would have to be known. Does he drink because he's Catholic and homosexual? People could draw that conclusion.

 

Irene Replied:

Are we sure that Waugh is writing a psychological character study and not a spiritual study? In other words, are we sure that Waugh wants the reader to focus on the psychological cause of Sebastian's alcoholism, of julia's failed romances, of Charles's discontent? Or does Waugh want the reader to focus on gracious moments in the lives of these undeserving characters? Does it matter if Sebastian abuses alcohol because he has failed to reconcile his sexuality with his moral upbringing, or because he has unresolved animosity toward a father that abandoned the family or a mother who he can't please, or because his brain chemistry makes him susceptible to addictive patterns or....? Or is it enough to see a young man who, despite so many advantages, spiraled down to squallor, but can still care for an ailing friend, can still be drawn to the spiritual in a monastery, can still encounter God and point others to God despite himself because God is so incredibly greater than the wounds we carry or inflict, is present even in the greatest depths of our despair, brokenness, sin?

 

My Reply to Irene:

You know Irene, I think that's right. I'm so conditioned for novels to develop psychological insights to the characters that it was blinding me to the larger theme. Perhaps that's what Mark in earlier comments was trying to say. I was slowly getting there with the unsolved mystery of Sebastian's personality.

 

You also said:

"Does it matter if Sebastian abuses alcohol because he has failed to reconcile his sexuality with his moral upbringing, or because he has unresolved animosity toward a father that abandoned the family or a mother who he can't please, or because his brain chemistry makes him susceptible to addictive patterns or....? Or is it enough to see a young man who, despite so many advantages, spiraled down to squallor, but can still care for an ailling friend, can still be drawn to the spiritual in a monastery, can still encounter God and point others to God despite himself because God is so incredibly greater than the wounds we carry or inflict, is present even in the greatest depths of our despair, brokeness,sin?"

 

Excellent! I think that is the theme to the novel.

 

This does bring up an interesting question on the artistry of novels. Can a novel bring up the psychological dysfunctions of a major character, beg the reader to try to understand the character, and leave them unexplained? I guess it can. Waugh seems to have here.

 

OK, you have answered the psychology part of the novel. But what about that state of innocence? Is Waugh including sexual activity (homosexual or not) as part of that state of innocence? One still needs to know.

 

And what about the reliability of Charles as a narrator? That too would be an open question.

My Reply to a lot of comments:

There's a lot here to respond. First off, if you do a search homosexuality and alcoholism, you will find homosexuals do have a higher rate of alcoholism and other addictions as well as a higher suicide rate. That's a reality. But I'm not talking about the reality. The psychology in a novel does not have to be clinically true. It has to have the sense of verisimilitude. The question is, what does Waugh intend. It is credible for a character in a novel to have a dysfunction due to a root cause. Is the tension between Sebastian's Catholicism and his homosexuality the root cause of his inability to cope? Is that why he takes flight (pun on his name intended) away from his family? I don't know. Waugh lays out other credible root causes. I think I listed five last week in an earlier comment. Is Waugh's intent to show that all of those potential causes are the reason, or to show that none of them, and that the problem is spiritual as Irene insightfully said above?

 

But then that raises another question. What is his spiritual problem? Obviously we are given a very dysfunctional person. As I see it, either we the reader are called to figure it out like a mystery or we are called to accept the unfathomable nature of another human being.

 

My Reply to Frances

Frances wrote: "Joseph Pearce in his excellent Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know, says: “It is evident that there is much of Waugh’s own pre-conversion self in the characterization of Charles Ryder . . . It is hard to see Ryder without seeing a shadow of Waugh, musing on his own loss of faith as a youth and his years as a hedonistic agnostic at Oxford . . . Ryder’s account of undergraduate decadence and debauchery reflects Waugh’s own riotous hedonism at Oxford . . . “

(Joseph Pearce, Literature, page 172).."

 

Yes, that is right. You cannot avoid connecting Ryder with Waugh, and as I pointed out last week (I think it was) it is well known and documented that Waugh had homosexual affairs when in Oxford. The person Sebastian is to have been modeled on was homosexual. Perhaps Pierce doesn't want to glamorize homosexuality in a Catholic book, but the homosexuality is there. The question is whether it's in Sebastian and Charles' relationship, of which I'm skeptical but it's possible. I also don't think there is any question that once we get to the Sebastian and Kurt relationship, that Sebastian is homosexual.

My Comment:

Of those who say Sebastian's sexuality doesn't matter, then does the adultery in the novel not matter? The novel is set in a Catholic worldview. Of course it matters. Every character (except Cordelia) has a moral failing.

 

When Julia rejects divorce as we will see (sorry for the spoiler) does not her Catholic worldview play into her decision? When Lord Marchmain returns to the Church, has he not rejected his life of living in sin? If Sebastian turns away from his homosexuality - I don't know if he does, I'm guessing here since I haven't finished the novel - will that be a return to grace?

 

If Catholicism is the novel's worldview, then the underpinnings of Catholicism control the novel's morality. And how could homosexuality not be important in a Catholic worldview, especially in the mid 20th century?

 

My Reply to Kerstin:

Kerstin wrote: "To me the larger issue here is immaturity vs. maturity. Sexuality is only a symptom. Lets look at infidelity and promiscuity in the upper classes. Marriages are often entered into not because of mutual affection but material security. The emotional needs of the spouses are secondary so they escape into extra-marital affairs and other pleasures. Being emotionally distant even to your family members is often the norm. This sort of thing seems to be taken very much for granted, and is ultimately very immature. The emotional investment and the recognition that your spouse, children, and other family members are human beings made in the image of God asks of us to make sacrifices for the good of the other. Only then can mature relationships develop. Who in this novel is making actual sacrifices for the good of others safe for Lady Marchmain and Cordelia? Even Charles is inconsistent. Yet all of them display some recognition that something very fundamental is missing.."

 

Yes, I agree Kerstin. This is akin to when I said that that Sebastian's problem is his inability to be responsible, to grow up. Sebastian is unfavorably compared to Lady Marchmain's brother Ned, who sacrificed his life in WWI by being responsible. And now we see that all the major characters are in some way irresponsible, or as you say immature.

 

Your last sentence is I think very important: "Yet all of them display some recognition that something very fundamental is missing." Now recall what Julia says about Rex.

 

He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. 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. (p. 231)

 

 

A man who is not whole. Perhaps Rex is the most distinct of the characters to show his fragmentation, but couldn't we say that about all the characters (except Codelia)? Isn't Sebastian not a whole man? Isn't Julia herself not a whole woman? Isn't Ryder not a whole man? He says so himself about himself, just after spending two years in Central America:

 

But despite this isolation and this long sojourn in a strange world, I remained unchanged, still a small part of myself pretending to be whole. (p. 262)

 

 

The modern world has created fragments of our humanity. That is one of the novel's central themes. This is at the heart of modernist literature, the fragmentation of man. This is right out of TS Eliot's poetry. Here is the first stanza of Eliot's "The Hollow Men."

 

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

 

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

 

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us-if at all-not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

 

 

So much of Eliot's poetry echoes in this novel. You can read that entire poem here:

 

Only by rejecting the outside world and accepting God's grace can we achieve wholeness. Only in Christ can we be whole because He is the only man that is completely whole.

 

My Reply to Irene:

Irene wrote: "I think it is fascinating how each of us are approaching this same novel from a slightly different angle and therefore asking different questions of the text. I love to listen to the conversation b..."

 

I don't think we're seeing it all that different. Yes, the grace is key but you can't just disregard or minimize everything else. Waugh brings us through a process of each character's brokenness. That's the bulk of the novel actually. You can't just discard it (I'm exaggerating) and just focus on the grace. There are reasons for the brokenness and that too is central. Now I agree I don't think the homosexuality is a big part of the novel even though Anthony Blanche does keep popping up. I didn't bring it up until mid way in our read. I don't even think it's there in Book 1, except perhaps in some germ which will flower later. Once you see Sebastian settled in a relationship with Kurt, however, it cannot be ignored.

 My Reply to Christine

Christine in BoMass, USA wrote: "I think that Charles and Sebastian were 'in love'. As I indicated before, young adults can fall in love with each other with no sexuality being involved at any level.

 

To your question Irene, I wonder if their 'love' only added to Sebastian's hurt. I do not think that Charles was gay. They might have participated in some 'if you show me yours, I will show you mine', however not much else. I wonder, because it did not blossom into a full blown love affair, that added to Charles' hurt. He did warn Charles that he would leave him for his family.

 

This would be the only reason I can see why the terms relationship has any real bearing on the story."

 

I do see the relationship between Charles and Sebastian in the same way. It's a platonic friendship of close boys. I don't know about the 'if you show me yours, I will show you mine' (LOL, what?), they are 20 years old after all; they are not little boys. But as I pointed out in an earlier comment, Cara says that this happens late with the English.

 

As I finished the novel, I realize that there is an underlying thread of sexuality throughout the novel. I'm reminded of when Charles first meets Julia and Waugh gives us that great line about Charles hearing "a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality" in Julia's voice. After Book 1, which I've said is the idyllic Eden, the narrative turns to finding spouses and soul mates as a key narrative drive. It turns to sex.

 

I have to believe the Sebastian/Kurt relationship is homosexual. Just as Charles matures to a heterosexual, the implication from the parallel construction is that Sebastian matures to being gay. His soul mate becomes Kurt. I don't find any idyllic or sense of innocence in this relationship.

 

I'm not sure I understand your last sentence. Are you unsure why Sebastian and Charles relationship has any bearing on the story?

 

My Reply to Christine:

Christine in BoMass, USA wrote: "Where is the grace? I do not see any grace? I must be blind as a few people have mentioned it already.

 

Grace would be if Sebastian finds some solace and re-establishes some relationship with his family.

 

Grace would be if Charles and Juila stay connected in a meaningful way.

 

I do see Grace in Julia returning to the Church.

 

Looking forward to being enlightened to the grace."

 

Certainly this is the central theme of the novel and requires some thought. Let me attempt to give a quick explanation using Sebastian's life to outline it.

 

Sebastian is an alcoholic. Being drunk is actually a sin. That is not a grace. But God can take that sin and bring graces from it. The alcohol brings Charles and Sebastian together. The friendship manifested in love that comes from it is a grace. Sebastian has some sort of psychological problem, which is not a grace. But the psychological problem contributes Sebastian's sense of charm, which brings friends together and spreads a certain love. This is a grace. He meets Kurt and the two bond in a homosexual bonding. Homosexuality is a sin, and that is not a grace, but the love that comes from it is a grace. It manifests itself into Sebastian's sacrificial love for Kurt. When Kurt dies and Sebastian is left alone, his alcoholism and his psychological problems (again not graces) lead him to a monastery, and the monks take him in. God turns the evil (Sebastian is not evil but the demons within are evil) into graces of love. The monks love him and care for him, and he now absent of the homosexuality and in full communion with the church can die in a state of grace. Much like his father returns to a state of grace before he dies, so too we are to assume happens to Sebastian. There are a lot of parallel constructions going on. We can probably dissect the other character's lives to find the graces that act upon them.

 

At least this is how I see it. Love to hear other's thoughts on this.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Post 2

This is the second post on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

You can find Post #1 here.  

I want to go back to the scene where Sebastian and Charles first drive out to country and ultimately see Brideshead Castle for the first time. 

 

At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among drystone walls and ashlar houses.  It was about eleven when Sebastian, without waring, 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)

 

The beautiful countryside, the summer scents, the delicious tobacco, and the sweet wine, which here is benevolent as opposed to the malignancy it takes on when Sebastian becomes an alcoholic,  creates a sense of paradise.  These sensations lift them up and “suspend” them above the earth.  Even the crock of gold suggests the heaven at the end of a rainbow.

In the digression from that scene, Charles describes his mental state as he entered Oxford. 

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that gray city.  (p. 32)

 

What Charles was looking for, like most twenty-year olds in college, was place where the inner love in one’s heart can flourish and come out.  Consider that place a Garden of Eden.  And he found such love through Sebastian.  He goes on to describe Sebastian: “He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.”  Set aside the implied homosexuality there; we can deal with that later. 

Then there is the trip to Brideshead Castle, and Charles is led into a world of upper class beauty.  The castle itself with its magnificent architecture, the artistic decorations, the luxurious lifestyle, the good friend, it’s like living in a cooking show in wine country.  For Charles, who is an art student and aesthete himself, this is as close to heaven and its innocence as possible. Years later Ryder would understand it from the loss of innocence of his adulthood.

 

That is the full account of my first brief visit to Brideshead; could I have known then that it would one day be remembered with tears by a middle-aged captain of infantry?  (p. 42)

 We see what this friendship and life at Oxford and Brideshead is for Charles.  But what is it for Sebastian?  Why does Sebastian avoid his family?  Why does his mood change as the two head away from Bisdeshead?

 

His mood was lightening now. The further we drove from Brideshead, the more he seemed to cast off his uneasiness—the almost furtive restlessness and irritability that had possessed him.  The sun was behind us as we drove on, so that we seemed to be in pursuit of our own shadows.  (p. 42)

 

Why is Sebastian happy to run away from Brideshead?  This is the central mystery of the novel.

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My Reply to Mark:

First, you're not late Mark, and I am interested in your reading of the novel.  I can see grace working throughout the novel.  That would be how I would read it too.  One thing I don't see that you suggest in your reading is that psychological damage is not an issue to the characters.  If that is what you are saying then why does Sebastian go around with a Teddy Bear, is obsessed with his Nanny, and hates his mother?  These are clearly authorial details to suggest a psychological problem, or as I like to put it, a psychological trauma.  Waugh is writing this in the 1940s.  He is well aware of the psychological novel.

 

The way I read it, which is what I was building toward, is that the characters are damaged, like all human beings are damaged.  It is a fallen world, and outside a moment in time where our joy approximates heaven's joy, we are forever trying to recapture that joy, that which most brings us to heaven, and forever falling short.  Yes, graces are being offered continuously but for the most part we are blind to those graces.  We don’t realize they are all around us.  It will only be through the graces offered in the sacraments of the Catholic Church that we can heal.  That is how I see the general theme.  It's been some twenty years since I last read the novel, so this reading is pretty fresh for me.  I could be wrong of course.  I can't wait to read on.

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Book 1, Chapter 4

Part 1: Charles spends the summer at Brideshead Castle with Sebastian while Sebastian’s foot heals.  This is the height of Ryder’s joy of the Brideshead experience.  He draws and paints the beautiful architecture of the castle, leaving his oil painting on a wall.  The two explore wines in the wine cellar and learn to wine taste.  We meet Bridey and Cordelia and have a dinner conversation over faith. 

Part 2: When Sebastian’s foot heals, he offers Charles a trip to visit his father in Venice.  We meet Lord Marchmain and his mistress, Cara.  Charles and Cara have a private conversation where Cara seems to have profound insight into the Flyte family.

 

Book 1, Chapter 5

Part 1: Autumn and back at Oxford for the new school year.  The partying is now greatly diminished.  Charles has settled to focus on passing; Sebastian drifts into listlessness.  Mrs. Marchmain has taken a liking to Charles, which has caused a rift with Sebastian.  Julia now has a high society boyfriend in the Canadian, Rex Mottram.

Part 2: At a Christmas party hosted by Mottram, Boy Mulcaster convinces Sebastian and Charles to slip the party and go to a lower class nightclub.  They drive there, meet some loose women, take them out to the car for a drive, and Sebastian, driving terribly drunk, nearly gets into an accident and is stopped by the police.  All three of the men are arrested.

Part 3: The three get locked up but Mottram gets them out with minimal penalty.  Sebastian continues to drift into alcoholism, feeling the need to drink continuously.  At the Easter party at Brideshead, Sebastian gets smashing drunk for all to realize he has a problem.  Charles is given the book Mrs. Marchmain has commissioned Mr. Samgrass to write on her three brothers who died in the World War.  He reads it on his return train ride to Oxford.

Part 4: Toward the end of the school year, Mrs. Marchmain comes to Oxford to force Sebastian to reside with Mgr. Bell, the university’s Catholic priest, for the next school year.  Sebastian leaves with her for Brideshead for the summer.  Charles, at his father’s house for the summer, receives a letter from Mr. Marchmain that Sebastian has left for his father but has agreed to go with Mr. Samgrass to the Levant to tour the Orthodox monasteries.  He is to return to Oxford after Christmas.

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Chapter four of Book 1 is I think the height of happiness in the novel for both Charles and Sebastian.  Here Charles comes to take care of Sebastian given his injured foot, and the two spend a glorious summer together isolated from the rest of the world and from responsibility.  I would like to provide some extensive quotes from that chapter.

 

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.

 

Book 1, Et In Arcadia Ego, which translates to "Even in Arcadia, there am I,” narrates the illusions and glory of youth, the irresponsibility of youth.  Arcadia was a region in Classical Greece that had a reputation of being “unspoiled, harmonious wilderness.”  It was considered a sort of Eden on earth.  So we see these early chapters an earthly paradise, a place of innocence. The quote, Et In Arcadia Ego, actually comes from a painting by Nicolas Poussin (see here), and the quote in itself implies a momento mori, a reminder that one, despite the pleasures of life, will ultimately die and face providential judgement.  It is quite clear that this is what Waugh intends with the quote.  It is written on the head of a skull in Charles’ dorm in one of the early chapters.  The quote captures both the “Arcadia” of Charles’ life, and a reminder that this is not the end of life.  It captures both innocence and pending judgement.

 

It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace; Sebastian in his wheel-chair spinning down the box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the succession of hot-houses, from scent to scent and climate to climate, to cut the muscat grapes and choose orchids for our button-holes; Sebastian hobbling with a pantomime of difficulty to the old nurseries, sitting beside me on the threadbare, flowered carpet with the toy-cupboard empty about us and Nanny Hawkins stitching complacently in the corner, saying, “You’re one as bad as the other; a pair of children the two of you. Is that what they teach you at College?”  Sebastian supine on the sunny seat in the colonnade, as he was now, and I in the hard chair beside him, trying to draw the fountain.  (p.88)

 

Here are the two friends living out their moment of joy.  This is like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (or perhaps Huck and Jim living on the Mississippi might be the better analogy) or Frodo and Sam (The Lord of the Rings), or some other classic literary friendship.  Here the two live out their friendship in the love (leave the homosexual suggestions aside still) that holds all true friends together, something beyond the earthly, something transcendent.  For Charles this is the joy he will try to recapture in subsequent years.  For Sebastian, this is a recapturing of an earlier joy, something rooted in his childhood as the Teddy Bear and the returning to Nanny (always returning to Nanny) suggests.

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I found the book Lady Marchmain has written on her three brothers who died in the World War to be fascinating and pregnant with meaning.  It’s a detail that’s rather oddly thrown in, and to my knowledge (I am only half way in the book) gets picked up later.  It’s sort of like graphic off to the side of a painting that really doesn’t play into the painting’s drama but somehow adds meaning to it.  This is what Lady Marchmain says to Charles as she hands him a copy.

 

“I should like you to have a copy. May I give you one? They were three splendid men; Ned was the best of them. He was the last to be killed, and when the telegram came, as I knew it would come, I thought: “Now it’s my son’s turn to do what Ned can never do now.” I was alone then. He was just going to Eton. If you read Ned’s book you’ll understand.”  (p. 156)

 

First, the book about the deaths of the three brothers is actually another momento mori, a reminder of each person’s eventual death.   Second, the son Lady Marchmain is referring to (“Now it’s my son’s turn to do what Ned can never do now.”) is Sabastian.  What Waugh has done is set up a parallel, a doublet, between Sebastian and Ned.  As Charles reads the book on his train ride back to Oxford, he has these thoughts:

 

Mr. Samgrass’s deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing—poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two, which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice. These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the traveling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures.  (p. 157-158)

 

The brothers are men of promise who with their sacrifice will secure the safety of the modern world.  Now back when Charles and Sebastian are visiting Sebastian’s father in Venice, Charles recalls Sebastian commenting on war.

 

I remember Sebastian looking up at the Celleoni statue and saying, “It’s rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war.”  (p. 112)

 

Now let’s compare Ned and Sebastian.  Ned has academic success, a future with promise, and a character who willing makes the ultimate sacrifice.  Sebastian flunks out of college, cares nothing about his future, shuns the thought of fighting in a war.  They are complete opposites, and yet Lady Marchmain entertained the thought that Sebastian could be another Ned.  There is a motif that runs through the novel of “responsibility.”  Recall Jasper lecturing Charles about responsibility at college; recall Charles’ father teaching him about the responsibility of managing his money.  When Charles and Sebastian go back to Oxford for their second year there is this.

 

Thus soberly dressed and happily employed I became a fairly respectable member of my college.

 

With Sebastian it was different. His year of anarchy had filled a deep, interior need of his, the escape from reality, and as he found himself increasingly hemmed in, where he once felt himself free, he became at times listless and morose, even with me. (p. 120)

 

One of the ways we can contrast the characters is by their level of responsibility.  Ned, for the little bit we learn of him, is the height of responsibility.  Lord Marchmain fails to live up to his responsibilities.  Charles starts as irresponsible but is learning to be responsible.  Julia too starts as irresponsible and by the end reaches a level of responsibility.  Lady Marchmain is also a pillar of responsibility.  Bridey too is all responsibility and no charm.  Sebastian, though all charm, at least at first, has no ability to be responsible.  Drinking to drunkenness and fleeing are seen in the novel as the means to avoid responsibility. 

###

Perhaps now is a good time to address in what appears is the homosexuality in the novel.  Is Charles and Sebastian’s relationship homosexual?  It’s certainly characterized as such whenever this novel is brought up, and I do think the secular readership is convinced of it.  The several dramatizations of the novel strongly suggest so.  I’m not so convinced.  The reason the dramatizations can only suggest it is because narratively it’s not there.  There is no rendering of it, nor any direct articulation of it.  So let’s go over the reasons for either it being homosexual or not, and I’d love to hear your opinions.

 

Let’s start for a case for their relationship being homosexual.  Well, Sebastian and Charles are rather chummy and do spend a lot of solo time together.  We do get that quote that from Charles when he first met Sebastian at Oxford.

 

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that gray city. (p. 32)

 

If he was in search of love, it’s rather curious that he settles with a man, Sebastian.  There is also the warning Jasper gives Charles in that first year of Oxford: “Beware of the Anglo-Catholics—they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.” ( p.27).  Certainly homosexuality was in the air at Oxford in the 1920s.  That has been documented and on which I’ll expand on further down.  Sebastian is not an Anglo-Catholic but a full-fledged Catholic, but it’s not too big a leap to think that the two groups being close and in some sort of sympathy would tend to flock together.  Anthony Blanche is clearly homosexual.  He tells Charles at that dinner they had together that he was “accused of unnatural vices.”  And he tells of his response to those accusers, ‘My dear, I may be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone.’  (p. 53).  And when his accusers were going to get rough with him, he responds with ‘Dear sweat clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me.” Blanche is part of the Oxford clique that Sebastian and Charles belong to, and again it’s not much of a leap to link Blanche’s homosexuality is also with the two central characters.

Indeed, a lot of these Oxford characters are based on real people that Waugh knew while attending Oxford in the 1920s.  Book 1 is very biographical.  Waugh is known to have homosexual experiences while at Oxford.  If you read this article on Waugh, he had three male lovers there, and one of them, Alistair Graham, would later become the model for Sebastian.  I have not read a detailed biography of Waugh’s life, but from the little I know (and I could be misinformed) he was homosexual as a young man but he considered it a phase of his life that passed after Oxford. It was something that was part of the Oxford culture at the time.  Again it’s not a difficult leap then to link his biography to the novel.

So what’s the case against Sebastian and Charles having a homosexual relationship?  Well just because some details of an author’s life make their way into a novel, it does not mean that every detail is meant to be carried over.  Remember, this was written some twenty years from Waugh’s Oxford experiences and by then he has converted to Catholicism, has married twice—the first time in 1928 just a few years after Oxford—and has fathered children, seven in all in his lifetime.  It’s quite possible, maybe even likely, that he may have wanted to capture the homosexual atmosphere of Oxford of the period but found homosexuality in the central characters to be contrary to his themes.

Second, there is no homosexuality narrated or dramatized or confessed by the central characters.  It just isn’t there.  Waugh easily could have made Sebastian in tension between this homosexuality and his Catholic faith.  In many ways it would have been more plausible than whatever childhood trauma caused him to avoid adult responsibilities.  But he didn’t. 

Third, if homosexuality were an unmentioned and semi-hidden theme in the novel, then why would Lady Marchmain and Bridey and Cordelia approve of the friendship?  It wouldn’t make sense for devout Catholics to go about as if nothing were wrong, especially given their reaction to Rex’s divorce.  

Fourth, why would Waugh be so indiscrete about the homosexual relationship?  He feels open enough to mention Julia’s pre-marital sex with Rex, and Rex’s sexual relationship with Brenda Champion.  He’s pretty clear on Anthony Blanche’s homosexuality.  If it were important to the central characters, then it wouldn’t be hidden.  If indeed it were important, then Waugh would have an obligation to make it clear.

Fifth, Charles as first person narrator is very honest about everything he narrates.  Why would he distort this?  It would go against his honesty as a narrator, and while some narrators are dishonest there is usually a point to the dishonesty.  I don’t see any point for Charles to be dishonest on this.  So then why did he say he went looking for love at Oxford?  Well, lots of college boys find it a time of looking for love, and lots still spend most of their college years with male friends. 

We do get an independent observation of Sebastian and Charles’ relationship, and it comes from Cara, Lord Marchmain’s mistress.  However, I wonder how accurate it is.  In Venice, she says to Charles in their private discussion.

“I think you are very fond of Sebastian,” she said.

 

“Why, certainly.”

 

“I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.”

 

She was so composed and matter-of-fact that I could not take her amiss, but I failed to find an answer.  She seemed not to expect one but continued stitching, pausing sometimes to match the silk from the work-bag at her side.

 

“It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl.  (p. 112-113)

 

Cara considers Sebastian and Charles to have a “romantic friendship.”  I find that a strange coupling of adjective and noun.  Romantic (small “r”) implies sexual but friendship implies platonic.  The combination I think implies a friendship that innocently extends to some sort of physical caress but short of cognizant sex.  You can then see that Charles was about to rebut some part of her comment.  He “could not take her amiss,” and fails “to find an answer.”  I don’t think Charles considers it a “romantic” relationship.  And then I think Cara hits on the perfect characterization: “It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning.”  That implies innocence.  At its heart Sebastian and Charles’ relationship is innocent. 

And that’s where I fall on this.  If Waugh wanted us to believe it was a homosexual relationship, he would have been clear about it.  As I see it the relationship is akin to Tom and Huck (Tom Sawyer) or Huck and Jim (Huckleberry Finn) or Frodo and Sam (Lord of the Rings).  Since it’s set in 1920s Oxford and is filtered through Waugh’s personal life, I think that biases our perception. 

But this is my reading.  I admit it’s ambiguous.  What do you think?

###

Christine Replied:

No they are not lovers. I wonder if Sebastian would have wanted it to be so and that navigating homosexuality and Catholicism is the caues for all his pain.

 

This may be dated information, so please feel free to comment if you know more, however something in my relative youth I learned that is a normal part of a persons development to fall in love with a member of the same sex prior to entering puberty. Now Charles and Sebastian are well beyond puberty, however so much of their actions in their first year of Oxford seem juvenialle I wonder if the premise still applies to 'cultural puberty'.

 

I would still like to understand why Sebastian is so tortured that he needs to be numb all of the time. His facial expressions in the BBC rendition are heartbreaking

My Reply to Christine:

Hi Christine. Two parts to your comment that I'll respond to.

 

Is it "normal" for youths to "fall in love" with a person of the same sex prior to puberty? It is common as far as I can tell for youth to have a very strong friendship with a person of the same sex prior to puberty. I have heard that it is not uncommon to have an attraction to a person of the same sex while in puberty. Is it "normal" depends on what you mean by normal. My perception is it's a minority of youth, not the majority, but still probably a significant minority. But I am not a psychologist and wouldn't know how frequent. I can tell you it did not happen to me. I also don't know the definition of "falling in love." An attraction is not necessarily the same as falling in love. Again I'm not an expert. Look at my comment above and see the quote from Cara. I do think it is supposed to be taken as a youth attraction which she claims happens late in the English.

 

As to Sebastian, I'm beginning to think that there is no particularly single reason for what I called his psychological trauma. I've been trying to list all the possibilities. Here's what I've come up with:

 

Father abandoning family when he was a child

Overbearing mother

Constricting Catholicism to his freedom

Fear of responsibility, which is akin to fear of growing up

Unfulfilled homosexual desire

 

Anything else?

 

Perhaps it is all or perhaps it is none, as Mark was trying to say. Or perhaps Waugh means it as a mystery of the human condition that cannot be discerned. I'm just beyond half way, so there is more to read but it should have been clearer by now.

 

I will say that for me it is unlikely it's the unfulfilled homosexual desire. Or even the homosexual feelings in tension with his Catholicism. If that was it, then Waugh would be playing games with the reader. He would have had the obligation to make the homosexuality clear. If it were that, I think it would be a flawed novel.

 

As I've continued to think on this, I am still holding with my original thought, that Sebastian has some fear of growing up and accepting responsibility. Read my comment from a prior post on Ned and responsibility and the contrast with Sebastian.