Book Review | ‘Brideshead Revisited’, by Evelyn Waugh
By: Harry A. C. R.
Tags: Books, Catholic, Books And Authors, Book Review, Literature

‘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.

How anyone can call the relationship between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte “platonic” is beyond me. If it were not enough that Charles expressly describes the “naughtiness” of his happy summer with Sebastian as “high in the catalogue of grave sins,” he also tells us he’d been “in search of love in those days”. And I needn’t mention Evelyn Waugh’s flings at Oxford, voguish as boy-on-boy might have been at the time. Those who claim that Brideshead doesn’t chronicle a gay romance, and in an especially gorgeous way I might add, only betray something about themselves.

But Charles and Sebastian’s Elysian summer of champagne and strawberries — which prefigures so many other fictitious depictions of “platonic” male relationships — isn’t the whole story, which centres on Charles’s relationship with Sebastian’s complex family. He describes how he came to meet the Flytes through an extended recollection, prompted when his battalion reaches a country estate in the last years of the Second World War. Charles recognises the estate as Brideshead, the Flytes’ ancestral home.

These recollections begin in 1923, when Sebastian first befriends Charles at Oxford. Sebastian is boyish and eccentric, but unquestionably charming. He takes a teddy bear called Aloysius with him everywhere he goes, and he belongs to a group of equally eccentric aesthetes which includes the ridiculous Anthony Blanche. Sebastian soon takes Charles to visit Brideshead Castle, and during the long holiday at the end of term, overplays a minor injury so that Charles will come to his home and stay there for the rest of the summer.

Despite Sebastian’s reservations and possessiveness — he frequently describes people as possessions of others — Charles gets to know Sebastian’s family and they warm to him. We learn that Lord Marchmain, Sebastian’s father, has left Lady Marchmain and now lives in Venice with Cara, his new squeeze. Cordelia, the youngest of the Flyte children, is a pious and precocious child. Lord Brideshead, or “Bridey”, the eldest, is serious and distant. Julia, who looks a great deal like Sebastian, is confident and composed. And then there’s a crowd of supporting cast members who look after the vast estate on which this dysfunctional family live. Owing to their ancient, aristocratic ways and their Catholicism, which comes up often, the Flytes seem to stand outside the changing society which Waugh so clearly deplores.

The Flytes are a throwback to an earlier time — one which, at least in Waugh’s mind, was more dignified and mysterious than his own. And Sebastian is an eternal child, which is both his charm and his undoing. His teddy bear (“Aloysius wouldn’t approve of that at all, would you, you pompous old bear?”) shares its name with the patron saint of youth, and his deep insecurity about his relationships is typical of infantile jealousy. It becomes clear relatively early on in the tale that Sebastian has been condemned to live this way by his controlling mother, a woman so charming and self-possessed that she can only come across as sinister. Lady Marchmain has so much control over Sebastian’s life that he has next to no responsibilities and therefore can’t grow up.

What Sebastian gives Charles — and it’s the main reason for Charles’s infatuation with him — is a second chance at childhood. Their first year together at Oxford is free of any responsibility, and they lead a life of unbridled pleasure. Sebastian’s love of beauty overcomes Charles’s inborn tendency to be studious and conventional: he defends his faith on the grounds that the stories are lovely, and when he apologises to Charles, he fills his room with flowers. And of course, Sebastian himself is “magically” beautiful.

But things end. And what follows that perfect first year strikes a different note. Sebastian can’t move on in the way that Charles can (and does), and now the porcelain-vase fragility which makes his character so interesting in the first part of the story starts to show its other side. Sebastian goes downhill.

But Catholicism, as much as his mother’s peculiar relationship with him, is to blame for Sebastian’s undoing. Without it, Charles notes, he would have the chance to be a “happy, healthy man”. Sebastian’s faith demands that he suffer, since to suffer is to be holy — something all characters in the novel agree upon. But at the same time, he’s a slave to beauty and pleasure. He’s “half-heathen”, and his inability to live with any ease in the secular or religious world adds to his growing isolation.

Faith creates conflict in all the novel’s characters, including the agnostic Charles, in various ways. It’s both the glue that holds together and ensures the longevity of the Flyte family through time and the primary force driving its members apart. Waugh comes out for Catholicism, but barely: what makes Brideshead pro-Catholic is the possibility of redemption that the faith offers for the novel’s characters, all of whom are sinners on a Catholic view, but all of whom can be redeemed. Early in the story, Sebastian’s prayer — “Oh God, make me good — but not yet” — points to the possibility of salvation Catholicism makes to its members, regardless, in almost every case, of how “fallen” they may be.

Modern discussions of the novel find its Catholic elements hard to grapple with, archaic and impenetrable as those may seem to many in our irreligious times. This inevitably leads to a kind of watered-down portrayal of Brideshead as a sort of aristocratic, English Call Me by Your Name. But Brideshead is really a kind of reworking of Ecclesiastes, differing from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in that the meaninglessnesss of life is, in the end, resolved by faith.