‘Brideshead Revisited’: Memory, Faith and Decay
A review of ‘Brideshead Revisited’, by Evelyn Waugh; Chapman & Hall, 1945.
Clive James was scarcely exaggerating when he said that ‘nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English’ than Evelyn Waugh, adding that ‘its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.’ Waugh wrote beautifully. It follows. Waugh called writing not ‘an investigation of character, but an exercise in the use of language’. He also thought exclusively in words. In an amusing interview in the Paris Review (conducted with Waugh while he smoked in bed), he said that perfect sentences would arise in his mind; all he had to do then was write them down. In Brideshead, the elegance of his prose is undeniable:
‘I have been here before,’ I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first day that my heart returned on this, my latest.
Waugh later called this writing ‘gluttonous’, saying he reacted to the hardship and rationing of the years between the wars. It starts off ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, the first part, following the prologue, of his very best book, a story about longing, loss, class, faith and personal identity set against the backdrop of a changing England. Its hero and narrator is Charles Ryder, and the story deals with his friendship with the Flytes, an Anglo-Catholic family haunted by spiritual and personal conflicts. The story is unrelentingly dreamy, wistful, beautiful, melancholic.
At the outset, Charles is a disillusioned soldier. It is the Second World War. He comes upon a sprawling estate in the countryside, and frozen to the spot, is asked whether he has been there before. Now the story unfolds as a retrospective, one long memory that starts with Charles’s time at Oxford. He meets the charming, troubled Sebastian Flyte, and a friendship, marked by drinking, laughter, and the idyllic settings of Oxford and Brideshead Manor, blooms:
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.
That phrase, ‘high in the catalogue of grave sins’, is not the first indication that this friendship between young men is, as it were, more than a friendship.
Cracks soon start to show. Where Charles and most others drink less as they grew older, Sebastian drinks more. He slides into alcoholism. The cause has to do with his relationship to his family of strict Catholics, particularly his mother. His drinking casts a shadow over his friendship with Charles, who soon becomes entangled with Julia, Sebastian’s sister. Their romance is charged with the same religious tension that has helped to fracture Sebastian’s identity. Charles, an atheist, cannot understand why this sad family cling on to what he sees as a system of belief that does them more harm than good.
At its core, the book explores the tensions between earthy wants and spiritual duty. The Catholicism of the Flytes pulls each character in different directions. Sebastian, Julia and Lady Marchmain, their mother, are bound by the rules of the faith; Charles, a sceptic, grapples with its power over their lives. Waugh treats faith with a guarded reverence, neither praising nor damning it. He seeks to explore its force: how it causes pain, offers meaning, shapes lives. Through faith or in the teeth of faith the characters search for purpose in the shadow of a crumbling world.
The prose is luminous. Waugh does not sketch this world but paints it with tenderness and melancholy. The dialogue is arresting: ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I have been happy,’ Charles reflects, foreshadowing his later unhappiness and reliance on the past for solace. But it is also subtle, pointing to the studied charm of the upper class and the emptiness and sadness underneath it. For Lady Marchmain, however, piety veils a controlling temperament. We see how we invert our feelings through our actions, playing at happiness when sad, humility when prideful, doubtful when faithful.
The framing device – a man’s recollections, touched off by a question – stresses the fleeting character of happiness, the certainty of decline. Waugh’s deep conservatism shines through. Like Lord Salisbury, he sees that ‘life is delay’, the slowing-down of what cannot be stopped so we can love the things we love for longer. Love, wrote Roger Scruton, is ‘a love between dying things.’ And when what we love has gone, we have only memory. The tonal shifts in Brideshead, between the vibrancy of youth to the solemnities of adulthood are seamless, stark, real, perfect. Waugh asks: can the sadness of life be redeemed?
Brideshead Revisited is close to perfect, a novel for all time. It is masterful, exploring love, loss, faith, life. Waugh’s depiction of a fading world is romantic and unsparing. His story lingers in the mind, like Brideshead itself — beautiful, broken, unforgettable.
