Contributed by Dr. David P. Kubiak From the time of its publication in 1945 Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited has produced in readers passionate, and passionately different, opinions. For some the book occupies a kind of cult-space, and its devotees can recite long passages of dialogue from memory. Others find its prose over-wrought and its theme a sectarian absurdity. Edmund Wilson, who was a great admirer of Waugh’s early comic novels, wrote a famous review of Brideshead in which he describes the book as “a bitter blow.” He decries Waugh’s snobbery, which “has emerged shameless and rampant.” The writer’s style, which at its best is “felicitous, unobtrusive, exact” has now become ridden with “dispiriting clichés.” Yet the central irritant is religion. Wilson cannot deal with a book that is “a Catholic tract,” in which its main characters “yield to the promptings of their faith and bear witness to its enduring virtue.” Waugh was bitterly wounded by this review, since Edmund Wilson was one of the few critics whose judgments he respected. But he must at one level have been pleased that at least Wilson understood what the book was about. When asked himself Waugh always said the purpose of the novel was “to trace the workings of the Divine Purpose in a pagan world.” Whatever other pleasures it may give, Brideshead Revisited wants most basically to show how the most improbable people work out their salvation in and through the Catholic Church. Brideshead is first a place, the ancestral seat of the Flyte family, whose patriarch, the Marquess of Marchmain, lives in self-imposed exile with an Italian mistress in Venice. His wife presides over the great house and her four children, the heir Lord Brideshead, or “Bridey,” two daughters, Julia and Cordelia, and a second son, the attractive and erratic Sebastian. Lady Marchmain belongs to an old English Catholic family, squires who never conformed during the Reformation and suffered under severe legal penalties for that fact. At her marriage her husband became Roman Catholic, but after the birth of the children lapsed both from the Faith and from his homeland. The novel traces in first person narrative how a middle-class aspiring painter called Charles Ryder becomes entwined in the destiny of this strange family. His introduction to them comes when he and Sebastian find themselves together at Oxford. I tell my students that they must read Brideshead before they leave college, since it stands high among classic books about young people at school, and is best encountered for the first time when the romantic glow Waugh envelops Oxford in is still plausible, and perhaps in its American form even felt a little by some Wabash men. The Oxford Waugh writes about is the university he knew in the 1920’s, where learning anything was distinctly optional, undergraduates took long champagne-filled lunches in their rooms, and bands of aristocratic hearties tormented the artistically sensitive aesthetes among the student body. One of the latter is the novel’s chief source of mantic comedy, Anthony Blanche, who after a drunken party of the Bullingdon club is forced into the central fountain of the Christ Church quad in order to protect his art collection. I had the opportunity in 1981 to spend an afternoon with the man Waugh based the character of Anthony Blanche on, his friend Sir Harold Acton, at Acton’s own version of Brideshead, the magnificent Villa La Pietra in Florence. After sixty years there was still about Sir Harold a playful sense of irony and appreciation for the absurd that Waugh found so attractive and gave to Anthony in the novel. In our talk he emphasized the idealizing, romantic side of Waugh, strangely juxtaposed with what could be his savagely rude public behavior. But the plot of Brideshead bears out the character analysis. Charles Ryder moves to maturity through his Oxford years, while his friend Sebastian remains a child, clutching his teddy bear in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. Lady Marchmain’s attempt to co-opt him as an ally in the redemption of her son fails, her daughter Julia marries out of the Church a Jay Gatsby-like character, and Sebastian is reduced to a hopeless alcoholic living in Tangiers. Charles is unhappy with his wife and begins an affair with Julia. Only Bridey and the impishly pious Cordelia have lived up to their mother’s single-minded goal of keeping her children in the Church and ultimately guiding them to a place in Heaven. Matters come to a dramatic head when Lord Marchmain returns from Venice with a failing heart, determined to finish his life in the house of his ancestors. Depending on the sensibilities one brings to the book the deathbed scene is either a great and moving testimony to the power of Faith, or a descent to unwitting comedy. Julia suddenly demands that a priest be called, the assembled family fall to their knees, and with the last strength he can command Lord Marchmain makes the sign of the cross and is received back into the Church at the very moment he breathes his last. Julia is moved by her father’s reconciliation to break off her affair with Charles. We see him at the end of the novel as an army officer back once more at Brideshead, which has been taken over as a headquarters during the war, kneeling in the chapel of the house he had known so well. At some point in the intervening years this detached and skeptical man has embraced the Faith of the family he encountered entirely by chance and who ultimately determined the course of his life. Such a brief summary does little justice to the book’s complexities or to Waugh’s exquisite feeling for the sound of an English sentence. What does capture the novel as well as any screen adaptation of a work of literature has ever done is the 1981 BBC production, which introduced a young Jeremy Irons as Charles and Anthony Andrews as Sebastian. Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Claire Trevor round out the cast, and the producers were given eleven hours to develop the story, much of which is narrated verbatim from Waugh’s text. (The full series is available on DVD.) I have yet to meet anyone who loves Brideshead who does not think the BBC version peerless, and I was not encouraged when I discovered that the novel would be committed to film once again, this time as a feature movie directed by Julian Jarrold for Miramax. The job could not be done any better than it already had, but as I discovered when I saw the film this past summer, it could certainly be done a great deal worse. True to our times Waugh’s theme has been turned exactly upside down. Religion is a stifling influence that ruins the lives of everyone in the film, with Lady Marchmain its sinister agent. Her husband’s return to the Church becomes a purely human gesture meant to console his daughter. Charles himself is a cynical social-climber. The bravura character of Anthony Blanche makes only two brief appearances, the second turning into a sincere compliment of Charles’s painting what is in the book sarcastic criticism. But most off-putting about the film is its making grossly overt the homoerotic friendship of the two main characters at Oxford – the audience is left with the suspicion that Charles is gratifying Lord Sebastian in order to gain entrée into his world of aristocratic privilege. A more vulgar disfiguring of the plot could hardly be imagined. Why would Waugh’s heirs allow Brideshead to be traduced in this way? I think I have an idea. Evelyn Waugh’s eldest daughter Teresa was married to the University of Michigan classicist John D’Arms, and I was introduced to her a number of years ago at the American Academy in Rome. The family resemblance was striking – no mistaking the source of her small, penetrating blue eyes. I remarked to her that a number of young men at a college in Indiana were reading her father’s novels. “That’s all well and good,” she said back, “but the real question is, are they being bought?” A keen eye for the pound/dollar is also in the Waugh genes, and the film rights plus potentially increased sales of the book must have been a large part of the decision. I doubt any of Waugh’s family has seen the movie. Unless you know the work well don’t go to this new version of Brideshead Revisited. Read the book, watch the BBC series, and you may well end up like many readers past and present who have emerged from the novel’s unique combination of romance and religion aesthetically and spiritually enriched. |
