Notable Quote: “A Poor, Dotty Irishman Called James Joyce” by Evelyn Waugh

This is just an amazing quote by Evelyn Waugh on James Joyce.  You have to know a little bit of literature.  You have to know that Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, which I’ve posted on here, was a curmudgeon of the highest order.  You have to know that James Joyce is the great modernist writer of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and, relevant to the subject here, Ulysses.  I don’t know if it’s probably not accurate to say that Joyce was the founder of modernist literature, but he certainly is its greatest devotee.  And in modernism we find that the stream of consciousness narrative is its most difficult to device for the reader to grasp.  James Joyce is “the major pioneer of stream of consciousness” as the Wikipedia entry says.

So now the quote: Waugh is asked about James Joyce’s influence on Waugh as a young man.  He replies with this.

 “A poor, dotty Irishman called James Joyce—if you’ve heard about him—he was thought to be a great influence in my youth. . . . and he wrote absolute rot, you know. He began writing quite well and you can see him going mad as he wrote, and his last books—only fit to be set for examinations at Cambridge.”

At this Waugh was asked: “He didn’t always write gibberish, did he?”

 His response: “No, you could watch him going mad sentence by sentence. If you read Ulysses, it’s perfectly sane for a little bit, and then it goes madder and madder.”

That's just too funny.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Post 6

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 20^th 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.

### 

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)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Post 5

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

You can find Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here.  

Post #3 here.  

Post #4 here.   

 

Book 3, Chapter 2

Charles has his gallery exhibition in London.  Meanwhile he furtively conducts an affair with Julia.  Anthony Blanche shows up at the exhibition, and he and Charles go out to a gay bar for lunch where Anthony is completely honest and tells Charles his paintings are charming but completely uninspired.  Meanwhile the international crises which will culminate into WWII occur in the background, involving Rex.  Charles and Julia are deeply in love.

Book 3, Chapter 3

It is two years later, and Charles and Julia have continued their affair, are very much in love, and it has become common knowledge, even to their respective spouses, that the two are a committed couple.  At dinner with Bridey one evening, Bridey tells them he is engaged to be married to a middle-aged woman, a widow and devout Catholic with three children.  He also tells Julia that he cannot bring Beryl to meet them at Brideshead because of the adulterous affair that is manifest to all between Charles and Julia.  Julia breaks into a fit of tearful hysteria, not over Bridey’s rudeness, but over its truth of her living in sin.

Book 3, Chapter 4

The two divorces are in process without the two opposite spouses offering much resistance.  Julia meets Beryl and finds her a bit different than Bridey described.  All the while the political and international events are coagulating into what will become the Second World War.  In November Cordelia returns home from serving as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.  We learn that she had tried and left a convent, and has now dedicated her life to service.  While in Spain she heard that Sebastian was ill, and so took a trip over to Tunis where Sebastian resides at a monastery.  She nursed him and learned of his life: seven years with Kurt, mostly together in Greece and then Germany, where Kurt was arrested and ultimately killed himself.  Sebastian went back to Morocco and then to Tunis at the monastery where the monks reluctantly took in the alcoholic.  There he lives a holy life despite the alcohol.  Cordelia speculates that he will eventually die there because of his deteriorating health. 

### 

Book 3, Chapter 5

As the two divorces make their way through the courts, as the international situation continues to reach a crises, Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead in January of 1939 for what is surely his final months of life.  He is ready to hand over the property to his eldest son, but upon meeting Bridey’s new wife he is so revolted that he changes his will and leaves it to Julia.  By Easter Lord Marchmain’s health has significantly deteriorated, and the three children against protestation from Charles bring in a priest, Fr. Mackay, to give Marchmain last rites.  To everyone’s embarrassment, Marchmain dismisses the priest summarily.  By mid-July Marchmain is near death.  Julia brings back Fr. Mackay, who asks for a sign of repentance from Marchmain, and with his last strength makes the sign of the cross.  A few hours later, Marchmain dies.  Through the giving of last rites, Charles has suddenly become a believer.  Julia too has experienced grace of returning to faith, and tells Charles that, despite her deep love for him, she cannot marry him.

Epilogue

Charles returns to the scene of the Prologue as soldier entering Brisdeshead as a place to quarter his company.  As Charles surveys the house, he notices the damages done by soldiers of other companies quartered there, including damage to his artwork, all of which culminates to a shameful disrespect for the estimable manor.  Nanny Hawkins still is upstairs, and Charles sits and has tea with her, talking of what’s become of the Brideshead family.  Bridey, Julia, and Cordelia have all ended up in Palestine.  Finally Charles enters the chapel, which has been restored, the red sanctuary lamp now lit, kneels, and prays. 

### 

I can’t help feeling that the central, controlling concept of the novel is displacement.  There is in the novel the displacement of Edwardian England by the force of the First World War.  We see this through the lives of Lord and Lady Marchmain, Charles’ father, and the deaths of Lady Marchmain’s brothers.  There is the displacement of inter war England by the Second World War.  Lives are displaced, Charles enters the army, and Brideshead castle is damaged and the furniture is packed away upstairs.  There is the displacement of the upper classes as middle and lower classes gain in status.  We see this in Hooper and Mottram.  And there is the displacement of something in each of the main characters which fractures their sense of being.

For Sebastian, the displacement seems to have occurred in childhood.  Earlier in this discussion I gave it a sort of “psychological” connotation.  What drives Sebastian is still psychological but not in the sense I meant it earlier.  Earlier I seemed to be drawn to some sort of causal link between some event in his childhood that could be at the root of his unhappiness and alcoholism.  Waugh even gives us possible suggestions for that causal link: a father who abandoned his family when Sebastian was a child, an overbearing mother, a Catholicism that constricts his freedom, fear of responsibility, which is akin to fear of growing up, and perhaps unfulfilled homosexual desire.  Now it may be all of these things or it may be none.  The novel is not intended to be that kind of psychological examination.  The mystery of Sabastian’s nature leads the reader to try to solve the mystery, but Waugh makes sure it’s unsolvable.  What the reader is left with is the fact of displacement from a happy, Edenic time to a fallen state.  This is still psychology—all studies of human nature must involve psychology (there was psychology as early as in the writing of Homer’s Iliad; there’s psychology in Adam and Eve)—but not as we think of psychology in the 20^th century sense.  Call this displacement, Catholic psychology.

For Charles his Edenic moment is in that summer with Sebastian at Brideshead.  It is at this moment he feels the near freedom of adulthood but still the wonder of a boy.  He explores a beautiful world, lives an epicurean life-style, and shares Sebastian’s friendship, a friendship based on mutual love.  Though they are a bit older than just mere boys, I’m convinced their friendship and love is boyish and platonic.  It would have to be for the novel to make sense.  Though not everything they do is holy, such friendship is ultimately holy, a grace that works in their hearts.

And then a displacement comes.  Sebastian sinks into alcoholism.  He cannot bear to live with his family.  Perhaps boyhood ends.  Perhaps pubescent longings mature into sex drives.  Perhaps the responsibility of adulthood—the responsibility that led Lady Marchmain’s brothers to die in WWI—pulls Sebastian and Charles away from that love.  But a displacement occurs.  Sebastian leaves England altogether and Charles becomes a semi-famous though mediocre painter. 

Such displacement leaves a hole in their being.  They try to fill it.  Sebastian with alcohol and a needy lover.  Charles with his work, lovers, a wife, and an affair.  Displacement incurs a longing to return.  His affair with Julia, who happens to look very much like Sebastian, is an attempt to return to that holy love of that first Brideshead summer.  Sebastian was “the first” not because there was sex involved but because with Sebastian Charles had found holy love.  Julia too has her own displacement.  She finds grace in her young womanhood.  She wants to marry Catholic, but the events of life just displace her away from that.  In the midst of their affair, Julia asks Charles if he had forgotten Sebastian and Charles tells her, “He was a forerunner.”  And then Charles thinks about that, contemplates it deeply. 

“Perhaps,” I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke—a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace—“perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.” I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.  (p. 349)

 

That thought is at the heart of the narrative.  Let me complete his thought in this way: “Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols” of a greater love of a distant home where we were as full of our being as God created us to be.  That's what I think he means in direct prose.  Call that place heaven, our true home, and call our journey in this life a striving to return, a journey to return to heaven, to return to our full being, a return to our true home.  The name of the novel even provides an association of it: Brideshead > Bridegroom > Christ > Heaven.  Revisited > Return > Home.  The novel is a return to Brideshead, which is a return to home, a home with all the pregnant meaning that Waugh has put into it.  This is why nostalgia figures so in the novel.  It is a longing to go home.

It is no coincidence, then, that the novel’s climax is with Lord Marchmain’s return to Brideshead.  Having been displaced by the First World War, and subsequently self-displaced from his family and ancestral home, in the end he returns home.  In one sense it completes the circle of his life, and, then having reconciled with God and his Catholic faith, he goes on to his eternal home.  When he makes the sign of the cross, he fully returns home and the displacement of twenty-something years has been righted.

This longing to return home is the grace that works on all the characters.  Allow me to paraphrase one of Jesus’s sayings:  “If you make my word your home, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32).  Displacement is the first experience when we are born.  It is beyond our memory, but the sense of that memory remains.  It is a memory of being loved, the mystery of being loved, which leads us to home in all its metaphorical senses.  Remembering this sense of home leads us to a deeper longing, the longing to be complete.  The sense of nostalgia is an inkling to a greater desire, the desire to be free and to reach our eternal home.  This is what I think this novel is about.

###

My Reply to Kerstin:

Kerstin wrote: "Has Charles found peace in the end or a place for a new beginning? He goes off to war and that's not very reassuring."

 

Well, he's certainly depressed but I have a hope that when it's all said and done, he and Julia will marry. From what I can tell I think annulments are valid for both their marriages. Now will Julia feel it is proper, I don't know. Maybe not. But Charles is Catholic now. Julia has returned to the faith. Sebastian has found holiness. Cordelia will be holy. Lord Marchmain is redeemed. Lady Marchmain is in heaven and hopefully reconciled with Sebastian and her husband. In time everyone's soul projects to be in heaven, though life on earth will entail suffering. It projects to be a happy ending.

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "Manny wrote: "he and Julia will marry."

 

Oh, no, certainly not that. Apart from the fact that if it is not on the page it did not happen, Julia refusing Charles is her choosing which world she is t..."

 

Oh I realize it's not on the page and it's all pure speculation, and really any version of speculation goes against the author's wishes.

He ended the novel at a point and that is that.

 

But to speculate, and it's not from some romantic conviction I may have. Waugh invested about half the novel in their relationship and then it falls apart in a dozen pages, maybe less, from against the desires of both. It's not too far a leap to project and speculate that the obstacles that prevent their union might be overcome. Charles has become Catholic - which he wasn't when they split - and the war will be over and Brideshead will return to normal and annulments are very possible. After all the word "annulment" came up earlier in the novel. It's planted there. It's not even a question of happiness. It's a question of settling the chaos. Bringing order to an unsettled situation. Revisited in the title is a return. Will the return end where the author leaves it or is it not likely a return again will occur ahead in time?

 

After all the parallels suggest it. Lord Marchmain dies in the faith. Sebastian finds his holy sanctuary. Bridey his Catholic wife and family, Cordelia her charitable works. Order has settled on each of their situations. It's not that big a leap to project the same for Charles and Julia.

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "Waugh does not, like some earnestly evangelical Christian authors, try to present the Catholic world as a place of good happy contented people making good life decisions and saying their prayers. Rather, the Catholic world is one of enchantment, one in which there is more to the world that what the five senses can perceive."

 

I certainly agree with that. The only quibble I have is your word "enchantment." Is it enchantment or supernaturally charged? Your use of the word enchantment suggests that it is wonderful and heavenly and conducive to happiness. I think you brought up Tolkein as an allusion for Waugh's Catholic world view, and with that I can understand your use of the word enchantment. But I don't think Tolkein is Waugh's model for his Catholic world view. I think it's T.S. Eliot. In T. S. Eliot's Catholicism (yes, I know, Anglo-Catholicism) the world is supernaturally charged and that supernatural affects our psyche in a way that's just not there in Tolkein. At least from my reading of him. I think your use of "enchantment" leads you to minimize the psychology that is going on in the novel. I think T.S. Eliot's Catholicism fits better with the unhappiness of following one's Catholic faith fully. It's Tolkein who presents some happy shire and a Utopian existence.

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "If Waugh's vision here is open to criticism, I think it would be that he bundled a set of specific aesthetics and social structures into his vision of the Catholic world as if they were a necessary part of it. I think there is some merit in that criticism, but at the same time, one could argue that part of seeing the world whole is going to be the opportunity for a more profound aesthetic experience. "

 

Yes it is open to criticism. Part of Waugh's vision of Catholicism it seems is inextricably linked to some medieval social structure of aristocrats and lower classes. You could say that comes from TS Eliot too. I assume the implication being the aristocracy have some sort of divine right to their place. Yes, there is a division in worldviews, but I would characterize it more as a feudal worldview (which to Waugh seems to be the Catholic worldview) in conflict with the capitalist/modern worldview of the rising middle classes which we see in Hooper and Mottram. No, I will have to disagree. I think displacement is a very apt term for the novel. The grace overcomes the displacements. The grace is operating to overcome displacement. That doesn't contradict Waugh

My Comment:

One other thing I will criticize Waugh for. After thinking about this for a while now, I think Waugh believes alcoholic drinking is actually a grace. Remember I said his values on drinking are not in line even with the society of his day, not to mention ours. As I've thought about this, I think he really thinks the drinking is part of the graces that flow from God. Perhaps he may even think of the drinking as a sacramental. Just look over the novel and see how many times drinking an alcoholic beverage is mentioned, and one has to be drunk from all the drinking they do on those occasions. It's a lot of alcohol. Charles and Julia are drinking champagne while the ship is pitching all over and everyone is seasick. I think every chapter has alcohol in it. I think there is more to it than just the surface drinking. I think Waugh intends drinking to be loaded with symbolic meaning. Waugh was known to being a drinker and maybe an alcoholic too. I do not think the Catholic Church sees drinking to the level of being drunk as a grace.

 

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "This is a pattern that is repeated for many characters, and Waugh announces the theme very explicitly when he has Lady Machmain read Chesterton's Father Brown story with the line about a twitch upon the thread."

 

I see nothing of what I speculated that would violate anything in that explanation of a "a twitch upon the thread." You seem to forget or not address that Charles is now Catholic. If Julia returned and got annulments - of which, again, was planted earlier in the novel - then their marriage would be a Catholic marriage. The twitch to return to Catholicism is not violated.

 

If Waugh intended to make the point that Julia and Charles must go on for the rest of their earthly lives carrying this cross (and he may well have intended that) then he should have shut the lid on all possibilities. But as I have pointed out, he left the possibilities open. His dramatic structure calls for the possibility and it would have been very easy for him to end the novel with the situation categorically closed. If it was important to him to make that point it would have been incumbent on him to do so.

 

Was this a failure on Waugh's part? Few novels are perfect. I don't see Waugh as James Joyce or William Faulkner. He did not create perfection here. I tend to start with a work as perfect to the author's intent. But to paraphrase DH Lawrence, once a novel has left an author's hands, he no longer has a say. It's the novel itself that speaks. It's all speculation on what happens after, but the lid is not shut closed on a Charles and Julia uniting in a Catholic marriage.

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: "This is a highly dissonant note. We instinctively want to think -- and so much inferior Christian literature is devoted to promoting the thought -- that being in harmony with God means being in harmony with the world in this life; that becoming Catholic will make you happy in this world. This is the prosperity gospel, in short, and it is heretical. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." "Take up your cross and follow me.""

 

I said no such thing. I despise prosperity gospel. You keep thinking that is my point, and it is not.

My Comment:

As it happened, yesterday [September 13^th] was the feast day of St. John Chrysostom and as I was reading about him I found this perfectly suited quote:

 

“Let there be no drunkenness; for wine is the work of God, but drunkenness is the work of the devil. Wine makes not drunkenness; but intemperance produces it. Do not accuse that which is the workmanship of God, but accuse the madness of a fellow mortal … For what is more wretched than drunkenness! The drunken man is a living corpse. Drunkenness is a demon self-chosen … ”

 

Waugh's later self criticism on this was warranted. And yes, I do enjoy a good drink myself. I am not a teetotaler

My Reply to Mark:

Mark wrote: ""Thus I come to the broken sentences which were the last words spoken between Julia and me..."

 

Charles never speaks to Julia again, therefore he certainly does not marry he."

 

It's first person narration where Charles is speaking in 1943. We are speculating beyond the ending of the narration. That is the current status as of 1943. It could not imply a future status because Charles is not a soothsayer.

 

Well, we've both made our points. I am not convinced by your reading and you are not convince by mine. We actually agree more than you think. So be it. There's no point in pursuing this further.

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. 

###

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.