In Memoriam: Thomas Howard

This is a little retrospective on Dr. Thomas Howard, author, scholar, English professor, conservative man of letters, and theologian who passed away on October 15^th.   In a most beautiful obituary in First Things, titled “Thomas Howard, RIP,” Kenneth Craycraft relates the heart of the man.  

 

Thomas Howard, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 85, made the journey from catholic evangelical to evangelical Catholic as gracefully and admirably as any who have made the journey. Though the adjective and noun changed places, Tom’s heart for the gospel never wavered. Neither did his gracious and generous friendship with all the evangelicals and Catholics for whom his influence was deep and abiding.

 I can’t say I was familiar with Thomas Howard for what he’s mostly known for, and that is as a theologian and famous convert to the Catholic Church from Evangelism.  I knew of Howard not from his religious writings nor of his famous conversion (which I did learn about later), but of his work on T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. Howard’s Dove Descending is the definitive book on Eliot’s great poem.  More on that later.

There are plenty of retrospectives on Howard for what he’s mostly known for.  From Crises Magazine, Michael Warren Davis in “The Last Victorian” writes:  

 

His orthodoxy was beyond question. Before he was one of the most popular and influential theologians in the Catholic Church, he was one of the most popular and influential theologians in the Evangelical movement. The Howards were a family of missionaries, among the most respected Protestant dynasties in the country. His conversion cost him his job at Gordon College and many of his friends. It certainly wasn’t a decision he made lightly. When he finally set off for Rome, it was because he knew he couldn’t really be at home anywhere else.

 

Getting to know him a bit through conversation and his books, what impressed me most was his love for Jesus Christ and the Christian faith, at once profound and childlike. He was fascinated by our great patrimony, and he wanted nothing more than to share it with everyone who would listen.

 

In Catholic World Reporter, Dale Ahlquist, who would later also follow Howard’s conversion into the Catholic Church writes in “In the Place of the Tiger” of the impact of Howard’s conversion:  

 

I knew Thomas Howard a lot longer than he knew me. As an Evangelical Protestant, I had been reading his articles for many years in Christianity Today, a magazine that was standard reading fare in the home where I grew up. I got my own subscription as soon as I went to college, and read it faithfully for many years thereafter. But in all those years, one article still stands out from all the others. It was 1985. I will never forget the headline: “Well-known Evangelical Author Thomas Howard Converts to Catholicism”. It was the first of a three-parter devoted to what was an earth-shaking event in Evangelical circles. And I don’t think I can recall being more unsatisfied with anything I’ve ever read. I was shocked. I wanted to know how and why this had happened. I had a thousand questions, and nothing that I read there – including even an interview with Howard – provided adequate answers.

 

His friend, and also fellow convert, David Mills had perhaps the best tribute in the Catholic Herald, in an obituary titled, “RIP Thomas Howard: 1935-2020.”  

First, a description of the man from Mills’ first encounter.

 

I met him in the late seventies, as a newish and secularish Christian. He invited me to a small reading group he hosted called Beer and Bull. The first book I remember us reading was an Orthodox work called The Way of the Ascetics, all of which was new to me, and a little strange. I also remember being amazed that so lively a man, who loved living so much, took asceticism so seriously. Only later did I see that his deep prayer and liturgical life created the lively man. Behind the effortlessness with which he seemed to move through the world lay a great deal of sacrifice and discipline and self-giving.

 

What a great name for a book club, the “Beer and Bull.”  It beats the boring name (The Catholic Thought Book Club) of my book club.  Second, Mills zeroes in on what made the man so compelling, and that had to do with a certain fairness to observation and thought.

 

Though a man of clear beliefs, he was not an ideologue: because he looked. Not a salesman or a preacher, but a man who shared what he saw and loved — and therefore a very good salesman and preacher.

 

“Because he looked.”  How many of us have a built in bias and don’t really look at issues.  A true intellectual should look.  Third, Mills summarizes the man’s legacy.

 

Thomas Howard lived a life of integrity and honor — and less importantly, achievement — whose character influenced an astonishing number of people and therefore the people they influenced, in a knock-on effect that will continue for generations. It’s not many people of whom that is true. The world saw a very gifted man, but people who knew him saw first a very good man.

 

As I said at the opening, I know of Thomas Howard from his book, Dove Descending: A Journey into T. S. Eliots Four Quartets.  Let me provide three short excerpts, which I hope captures the man, his thought process, and his elegant writing style.  First from the Preface.

 

In my own view, this sequence of four poems—or this one single poem: it is not easy to settle even this elementary question—represents the pinnacle of Eliot’s whole work.  He worked on it (them?) over a period of several years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, after a long period of having produced a number of dramas.  The work (let us settle for the singular, without arguing the point too shrilly) lies on the hither side of the Himalayan watershed from the early poetry that had made him the giant of English poetry in the twentieth century: Eliot had converted to Orthodox Christian belief several years before he embarked on Four Quartets.  (Ignatius Press Edition, p. 14-5)

 

Three lovely and elegant sentences which reflects the elegance of the man described by Warren Davis, Ahlquist, and Mills.  When I searched around for excerpts of Howard’s writing, what struck me the most was the beauty of his prose.  Second, looking at Eliot’s poem from an overarching view in the chapter Preliminary Remarks, Howard had this to say.

 

If we can venture, at mortal risk, to attempt a theme for it all (readers will sigh, having heard that word too many times from their English teachers), we might say that it all has something to do with the odd business of being mortal, that is, intelligent creatures existing here and in time, when all the while we are profoundly dissatisfied with this dismal sequence of past, present, and future.  Time, in other words.  The trouble with time is that it drains things away.  We mortals have “intimations of immortality” and wish things would stay put, but they don’t.  Houses burn down.  Fields are bulldozed into highway interchanges (“bypasses”, in British English).  We die and are buried.  (p. 20, italics are Howard’s emphasis)

 

Why of course!  So simply put.  If you have not read the Four Quartets you will not realize how that perfectly captures the heart of the poem, a poem of the highest modernist complexity that has baffled many a reader.  I have spent years reading that poem and could not find the succinct words to explain it.  I have read other literary criticism of the poem, and no one has put it so simply and so accurately.  No one, I dare say, has conceptualized the totality of the poem like that.  And now you know.  So, if you haven’t, go read the poem!

Finally I want to highlight a section of Howard’s commentary on a particular passage in Four Quartets, this from the second quartet titled East Coker.  First the passage from Eliot’s poem.

 

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God.  (lines 102-114 of East Coker of the Four Quartets)

 

And now for Howard’s commentary.

 

Readers should have no difficulty with the first nine lines.  When men die they go into the dark.  That would seem patent.  The jolting thing about Eliot’s particular listing of death’s conscripts is the (typically Eliotonian) “unpoetic” nature of the roster.  All these successful citizens.  The Almanach de Gotha is the register of European royalty and nobility.  The Dirctory of Directors (there is one) seems particularly ironic. 

 

And of course we all go with them.  But what about this “silent funeral, / Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury”?  Well, for a start, most funerals are silent, more or less.  Not much clashing and clanging of cymbals and so forth.  But “Nobody’s funeral”?  You have to have a body for a funeral, surely?  Yes, but the point is that by the time you tot up all the funerals there are, you find yourself concluding that whose funeral any particular funeral is unimportant.  They are all the same.  Dead men are, as far as this world is concerned, Nobody.  “No one to bury”?  Again, this duke or director or distinguished civil servant has joined the anonymous ranks of the dead.  We are burying a nonentity.  (p. 77, italics are Howard’s emphasis)

 

Well, Thomas Howard has now gone into the “dark, dark” himself.  He is not a “nobody.”  He was a brilliant, courageous, and elegant man.  Let us hope that he now has passed the darkness and entered the eternal light.  May he rest in peace.

Postscript: If you haven’t realized, the name of this blog, Ashes From Burnt Roses, is taken from Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Sunday Meditation: You Know Me

Psalm 139:1-3

 

O Lord, you search me and you know me,
you know my resting and my rising,
you discern my purpose from afar.
You mark when I walk or lie down,
all my ways lie open to you.

 

Can’t you just feel God within you, probing you, as you read that?  But the words that are at the crux of this is, “you know me.”  What does it mean for God to know you?

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.

###

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.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Post 1

We read Brideshead Revisited  by Evelyn Waugh at Catholic Thought Book Club.  I’m going to have a series of posts on my thoughts and comments.  I will also provide chapter summaries. 

I should say that my earlier ideas may not have been revised as we read along and got a fuller understanding of the novel.  I will place a [this thought has been revised] in red font where I find these thoughts.  Why not just delete the thought that has been revised?  There may be value in the logic of the first thought, and perhaps the first thought is correct while the revision is off.  I’ll leave it for the reader.

The full title of the work is actually, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, and it tells the story from Charles Ryder’s first person point of view, covering his college years at Oxford, where he makes a friend, Sebastian Brideshead, a British Lord and Catholic, covering the interwar years where he is welcomed as a family friend in the Brideshead household, and ending with his service in the Second World War. 

Evelyn Waugh came from a family with an aristocratic past, was a convert to Catholicism, and was a prolific writer.  Waugh too went to Oxford which had a profound impact to his life.  Much of the novel is autobiographical. 

Summary

Prologue

It is in the midst of World War II, and Charles Ryder is a Captain in charge of C Company of a Battalion.  They are stationed in Scotland outside of Glasgow on a farm where they have been in training, and the Battalion has been directed to travel south to England by train.  They arrive at their destination in the dark of the night and, after spending the night, they travel to their final station in trucks (lorries).  Settling into camp Ryder finally understands that he has arrived in Brideshead, a place he knew quite well and had been the formation of his adult life.

Book 1, Chapter 1

Ryder through a flashback goes on to describe his first visit to Brideshead, but he takes a circuitous and digressive route to that visit.  We learn of Ryder’s attendance at Oxford, his living quarters there, and his poor grades.  We see Sebastian luring Ryder into a motor car ride to the country for a picnic of strawberries and wine.  Then there is a flashback inside the flashback where Ryder’s cousin Jasper provides advice on finances and proper living at Oxford.  This leads to a memory of meeting the type of students who Jasper warned about, and in that crowd was Sebastian.  Ryder describes that first meeting with Sebastian and of their subsequent friendship.  Finally the Ryder’s narrative returns to that picnic where Sebastian makes an impulsive decision to drive Ryder to see the house ”where [his] family lives,” and especially to meet Sebastian’s nanny.  Finally the chapter concludes with a short tour of Brideshead.

Book 1 Chapter 2

Jasper meets up with Ryder and rebukes him (the “Grand Remonstrance”) over his lifestyle, profligate spending, and friends he has made at Oxford.  Later, on an Easter vacation Ryder reflects and approves of his lifestyle.  Ryder then describes Anthony Blanche and their dinner together, where the conversation turns to Blanche offering his observations of Sebastian and Sebastian’s individual family members.  His portrayal of the family is ghastly at best, and Ryder doesn’t know what to believe.  The next day, Sunday, Ryder walks about Oxford as everyone else seems to be going to some church service.  He meets Sebastian coming from Mass and he tells him of his conversation with Blanche the evening before.

Book 1 Chapter 3

Everyone at Oxford has dispersed for what I take is the summer vacation, and Ryder not having any money returns to his father’s home.  He hints at squeezing money from his father but his father plays dumb and offers none.  His relationship with his father degenerates into a sort of passive-aggressive battle where his father seeks seclusion free from social and even family connection while Ryder just wants some money.  Finally he receives a letter from Sebastian that he has been injured and to come to his place quickly.  He does so, happy to break away from his father, and finds Sebastian has only broken a small bone in his foot.  He is coaxed to keep Sebastian company while he cannot walk, which is for the rest of the summer.  By doing so, he relieves Julia so that she can go off for her summer vacation.

###

Before I get into themes and understanding of the characters, there are two things I’d like to say about the writing.  My goodness, this is some of the best prose writing in English of the 20^th century.  He’s as good as Nabakov, Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, Cormac McCarthy.  He may have equals, but I don’t think anyone surpasses him.  And it’s not just a lyrical passage here and there.  It’s constant, throughout.

Second, I’m amazed at his narrative control as he weaves back and forth through flashbacks and digressions.  It’s effortless.  Chapter one is a masterpiece of narrative.  His movement of through time is stunning.  I don’t know if I’ve come across a chapter like that before.  One has to look to William Faulkner that kind of depth of narrative.  I’ve never read anything else by Evelyn Waugh except a few short stories, but his artistry and his skill is of the highest order.

I have read this novel before, but it’s been a while.  I remember the writing being good, but I don’t remember it being this good.  It’s breathtaking.

###

I know when you look at some of the commentary for this novel, you find people speak about the unmerited grace that befalls the characters, and that Waugh himself says the novel “deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace.'”  Yes, there is grace in many places in the novel but ultimately the novel has to be about more than that.  You can’t just have a four hundred page novel where a whole bunch of action occurs and then at the end things are resolved by grace.  There has to be an ordering principle to those four hundred pages of narrative. 

I see at least two large themes in the novel.  There are more perhaps, but this is what I’ve zeroed in on.  First I think there is the theme of what I shall call that of arrested development.  In everyone’s life there eras that are so formative that we return to them in some way.  We become rooted to a time and place in our lives.  But most of us grow out of that formative period and develop further.  Those that don’t grow remain in psychological arrestment, a damaged psyche.  Think of Hemingway with World War I and its aftermath.  Even when Hemingway wasn’t writing about WWI, it always seemed to be there in the background, and his failed marriages and ultimate suicide speak of a damaged individual.  [Edit: In retrospect, I have re-assessed this theme.  While I still think there is a psychological desire to return to a time and place, the implication of a modern psychology of “a damaged psyche” is not what Waugh wants to say.  I develop this further in a subsequent post where instead of modern psychological terms I address this as a Catholic psychological model.]

In this novel, Sebastian’s childhood seems to have caused an arrestment of psychological development.  The energy of his life seems to be of desiring that innocence of childhood.  He has this silly Teddy Bear he keeps around to pull him back into that comfort.  Whatever the formative events of his childhood, pleasure or trauma, it has locked him into that mental state.  He does not deal well with the adult world, and the alcohol, the flightiness, and the homosexuality (consummated or not, we don’t know) are his means of building a wall against that adult world. 

Charles Ryder too seems to be arrested in some way, but his arrestment is not from childhood I think but from those university years in Book 1.  Certainly his childhood has not been a good one.  From what I gather his childhood was deprived of affection: his mother died while he was young and his father was emotionally distant.  It seems like his childhood was one deprived of innocence, which in some ways is the opposite of Sebastian.  He is like many young people once they go off to college and experience the freedom of young adulthood, finding it exhilarating, and to some that exhilaration is formative.  I didn’t go away for college but even with me living in New York City during my college years I experienced the freedom of cheap restaurants, college bars, and hip clubs with a new set of college friends.  I grew out of that eventually but even with me it took a while and it too was formative for me in some way that I don’t know if I’ve ever completely outgrown it.  Charles Ryder is being formed in these early years of Oxford that will stunt his development later on.

Another character too that is being formed to some level of arrested development I think is Julia.  Here she is in the early chapters, about eighteen-ish; she is now out in the world as a lovely “debutant,’ rich, beautiful, perhaps blossoming into her sexuality, and the center of attention.  She’s like a southern belle, the queen of the parade, the prima donna of the ball.  It is an exhilaration from which her persona will have difficulties in outgrowing.  Perhaps now is the moment the dysfunctions of her future life are formed.

The second big theme I see is that of Catholicism.  But what about Catholicism?  Catholicism is just a subject, and a properly articulated theme requires a subject and a predicate.  Could one say possibly say that Catholicism is the source of the Flyte family dysfunction?  After all, Mrs. Marchmain, devout Catholic and mother, is the shaping persona of the children.  But Catholicism seems to be a positive entity in the novel, at least so far, so that doesn’t seem right.  I’m not ready to dismiss it, but I think we better look for more possibilities.  Could it be that Catholicism in contact with a modern world leads to some sort of disorientation, or worse, dislocation?  Could it be that the values of the modern world make Catholicism impossible to adhere to and drown even those who sense its truth?  It’s too early in the novel to reach any conclusion.  Let’s see how this pans out.  Let’s return periodically and see if we can discern and articulate how Catholicism is at the core of the novel.

###

My Reply to Madeleine:

Madeleine wrote: "Just throwing this out there: I'm wondering about the names in the story, as many authors employ connotative suggestions or meanings to fit their characters. Ryder, Flyte, Marchmain maybe?"

Yes in general they seem to have some sort of echo of significance, but I can say there is some correspondence to some idea. Flyte is perhaps the one than one best can wrap one's arms around but only if you limit yourself to Sebastian. I don't know if the other family members are flight-y. I guess the father maybe.

And what about Charles as Ryder? Ryder of what?

The only name I can really pin down to have meaning is "Brideshead." Brideshead for bride, marriage, the Church as the bride of Christ. I'm pretty confident that's what Waugh wants to suggest.

Marchmain sounds aristocratic, but I can't pin any meaning to it.

As to first names, Sebastian was a famous martyr and saint. I think that more or less fits. Julia was also a saint but more obscure. Cordelia from King Lear perhaps but so what? The good daughter?

As I said above, the names seem to echo some significance but rather not directly. Which I think is very skillful.

My Reply to Blake:

Blake wrote: "One of the things I most appreciate from the Prologue is Charles's association with the popular zeitgeist and trends of the day with Hooper. I can find myself doing the same with the young adults I..."

Yes, and from some note I saw somewhere, Hooper is of the lower classes rising up after the war.

My Reply to JT:

Jt wrote: "One theme which emerges in the book is the problem of modernity and tradition: how is our world changing and what are the implications of these changes?."

I agree. I was being coy in my comment above. The central theme seems to be the conflict and tension of traditional Catholicism in contact with modernity.

My Reply to Frances:

Frances wrote: "I think another theme is nostalgia, the yearning for the past. In this regard, it’s interesting to study how Waugh employs the sense of hearing to access the past:
“‘What’s this place called

?’
“He ..."

Don't you think, Frances, that "nostalgia" is not a strong enough word to describe what is going on? Sebastian doesn't carry a Teddy Bear around because he is nostalgic for his childhood. There is some psychological trauma that has happened. Above I called it "arrested development." Later when Ryder's marriage fails, is it because of nostalgia or because there is some formative experience that has led him to be dysfunctional?  [Edit: I re=assessed this also.  Nostalgia does have a purpose in this novel.]

###

Christine brings up a good point.  Why is this a Catholic novel?  First for those that don’t know, Evelyn Waugh was a convert to Catholicism, and that conversion was the fundamental to life.  From his Wikipedia entry:

On 29 September 1930, Waugh was received into the Catholic Church. This shocked his family and surprised some of his friends, but he had contemplated the step for some time. He had lost his Anglicanism at Lancing and had led an irreligious life at Oxford, but there are references in his diaries from the mid-1920s to religious discussion and regular churchgoing. … In 1949, Waugh explained that his conversion followed his realisation that life was "unintelligible and unendurable without God"

Second, the Flyte family are Catholic in a way that is central to their lives.  Each of the four Marchmain children are shaped by the mother’s very strong Catholicism.  In fact, one might wonder if her Catholicism hasn’t brought about the dysfunctions of the family.  But I don’t think so.  Third, both Ryder and Lord Marchmain, the family’s estranged father, are converts to Catholicism with the span of the novel’s narrative.  Fourth I would put that Catholicism is hovering in the background of every scene.  In that dinner between Anthony Blanche and Ryder, where Anthony describes the Marchmain family, this is what he recalls of his early days with Sebastian:

He and I were both Catholics, so we used to go to mass together. He used to spend such a time in the confessional, I used to wonder what he had to say, because he never did anything wrong; never quite; at least, he never got punished. Perhaps he was just being charming through the grille.  (p. 55). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Everything seems to either deal with Catholic values, Catholic rituals, or Catholic theology.  Catholicism is everywhere, mentioned or not mentioned.  Certainly Catholicism is central to the novel.

###

Also, if people didn't know, the BBC created a for TV dramatization of the novel. It's fantastic. It's been called by some the finest for TV dramatization ever. I think it was produced in the 1980s. I highly recommend it. It's has its own Wikipedia entry.

It's also on Amazon Prime. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, it's free. It's eleven hours long and I've been watching. It's remarkably faithful to the novel, scene by scene.  Here is a trailer.

Sunday Meditation: A Marriage With Mankind

From the Divine Office, Ordinary Time, Evening Prayer, Monday’s Week II, Psalm Prayer.

 

When you took on flesh, Lord Jesus, you made a marriage of mankind with God.

For those who don’t pray the Divine Office—and I encourage taking up the discipline of praying the Divine Office, otherwise known as the Liturgy of the Hours—there are prayers at the end of every psalm.  The first sentence of Monday’s evening prayer at the end of the second week in the cycle was rich for meditation.  It certainly illumines the Christ as bridegroom metaphor.