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. 

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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?

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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.