Some thoughtful reflections on Brideshead Revisited. I read Brideshead for the first time when I was 18, and I have read it only once since then; a few weeks ago in Kefalonia. All my friends like it. It leaves me cold, for the most part, if I'm perfectly frank. I have never seen the series, or the film, and I have no real affection for any of the characters, or affinity with either the university, the estate, the ship, the artist, or Venice. I have no sympathy for the kind of extravagance and depravity to which the young Charles and Sebastian stooped. Charles Ryder seems a social climber to me, and more than a bit mercenary towards the end of the novel. I certainly found reading Jasper's counsel in chapter I about the subtleties of the social graces and conventions at the university jarring, but maybe that's because I never went to Oxford and never once went into the JCR at Heythrop? Call me a philistine but I have never made any attempt to keep up appearances: what you see is what you get. Some have compared me with Sebastian Flyte over the years, which, like my parents saying that my sister and me are very much alike, I just do not see. Anthony Blanche (who is not mentioned in the critique) seems a despicable caricature of a homosexual, as catty and as camp as can be. Brideshead himself is a bore. In fact, of all the characters in Brideshead the one I like most, and I don't much like him, is Charles' eccentric father. Maybe that's because his waspish and scarcely concealed polite contempt reminds me so much of my mother?
Maybe this is Waugh's understanding of the operations of divine grace among this group of undeserving incorrigibles but I have never understood Charles' conversion to Popery at the end. He seemed so convinced of its vanity and spuriousness throughout the novel (c.f the rather moving deathbed of Lord Marchmain) that his seeming conversion comes across as inextricably linked up with his, what would you call it, "missed opportunity" with Julia? Although maybe that's the whole point and that, thick as I am, I just don't get it.
But it's as I said recently about the privileged and aristocratic. They don't deserve happiness; misery and hellfire is the price they pay for their wealth and, in Charles' case, libertinism. And poor old Sebastian! No, my overall opinion of Brideshead is that it's all vanity. It is good literature but it's a nasty work.
Those are very hard comments indeed Patricius and ones I would strongly disagree with. As you know I think it (in both versions old and new) rather wonderful. I understand Waugh's reference was the Lygon family. I disagree with you assessment that Charles Ryder was a social climber too: he clearly comes from UMC stock and is really only going up one 'notch' to Julia as UC. Waugh himself bemoaned some of the excess of language in the original version as he thought the world of the Flytes would come to an end. Nowadays the Flytes would have either a safari or theme park at Brideshead.
ReplyDeleteNo, I am sorry, but both versions are a wonderful story and there is no real evidence that Charles becomes a papist - some hints but no more.
Brideshead tells a fine story, and Waugh's description of the sublimity of the estate and the decency of that lost age is very moving, but I found the characterization gratuitously awful. But that's my opinion based on two readings over ten years.
DeleteOne thing I learned about Waugh during English literature classes at school (A Handful of Dust) was his pessimistic, cynical and Augustinian view of humanity. It is difficult to like any of the characters in Brideshead, though one has a certain affinity at the same time. It is "haunting" and that is perhaps the appeal of Waugh. My impression of Charles is not one of a social climber, but rather one who had burned himself out by the time he was in the Army for the war. Charles is very subtle. I could write much more, but perhaps Brideshead needs another couple of readings.
ReplyDeleteI didn't like it very much either. People who are very much more well off than me, finding every possible reason they can to lose at life, including a particular understanding of God, which- it seems to me- has very little to do with the God of the living. Perhaps this is the god of the noble loser.
ReplyDeleteI agree. It reminds me of that scene from My Fair Lady in which Professor Higgins' mother upbraids him and Colonel Pickering for playing with their lives and otherwise being immature. Apropos! Charles and Sebastian are spoiled, selfish brats.
DeleteWhat was that saying, again? "When Adam dug and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?"
Blast! I've just realised I've quoted John Ball favourably! Pay no heed. It's the kind of sullen temper and hubris of the impotent.
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