Brideshead Revisited Revisited

Host Bill Goldstein – Under the aegis of the 92Y

Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was first published in 1945. In the last days of WWII, Charles Ryder and his battalion are sent to billet at an estate called Brideshead at which he spent a great deal of time as a young man immutably enmeshed in complex interactions of the aristocratic Marchmain family.

The book is told in flashback beginning at Oxford when Charles embarks upon a deep friendship with black sheep Sebastian Flyte. It then carries us through self-destructive Sebastian’s belief that Charles has taken his family’s side against him causing a breach, following the family and Charles into decades of personal, social and political change including a powerful, but too late liaison with Julia Marchmain. At last Julia asks Charles, “You loved him, didn’t you?” to which Charles replies, “Oh yes. He was the forerunner.”

Running through the novel like vertebrae are nostalgia for English aristocracy, Catholicism (especially divine grace and reconciliation), and homosexuality of the era with imagination and precision. A faithful television mini-series was produced in 1981 and can be streamed on Britbox, Googleplay and Vudu. It’s splendid.

Host Bill Goldstein puts Waugh and his book in context, tracks back to character inspiration, examines underlying messages, and shows how Brideshead previewed the popularity of Downton Abbey.

In January (late) 1922, young Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, like his protagonist Charles Ryder, arrived at Oxford. Son of a publisher and brother of paternally favored author Alec Waugh (already scandalized for a 1917 homosexual novel), much was expected. He was secretary of the Hipocrites Club. Its Greek motto from an Olympian ode by Pindar,      means ‘water is best.’ Members preferred beer, wine and spirits.

Waugh drank copiously, wrote short pieces for undergrad magazines, was considered a talented illustrator, and embarked on several important homosexual relationships. Goldstein points to a romance with Alastair Graham as the probable model for Brideshead’s Sebastian Flyte. Waugh was often entertained at the Graham family’s early 19th-century country house, Barford House. In the manuscript of Brideshead Revisited, the name “Alastair” sometimes occurs instead of “Sebastian.” Waugh said of him he was “the friend of my heart.” We’re shown photos of young Waugh and Graham.

Poor behavior led to the loss of Waugh’s scholarship. Like Charles, he left school early. The author taught at several boys prep schools, considered a career in cabinet making, attempted seaside suicide, published short stories and a commissioned biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He married first wife Evelyn becoming known collectively as “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn. It lasted barely two years.

His next book, Decline and Fall, was a social satire based on early school days. “Themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation and social bedlam…both drive the novel forward and fuel its humour.” (David Bradshaw in the introduction to the Penguin edition.) This was followed by Vile Bodies which satirized ‘the bright young things,’ rich partying youth after WWI.

In 1930, Waugh stepped away from Anglicanism and was converted to the Catholic Church, surprising friends and family alike. Like Sebastian’s mother, Lady Marchmain, the author went to mass every day. Catholicism is pervasive in the novel. Goldstein observes Waugh makes clear the unchanging nature of faith, its permanence. “Even those who have left it like Charles (Ryder) can’t rid themselves of it entirely,” the host notes.

By 40, Charles’ age at the start of Brideshead, Waugh had developed a reputation as a comic novelist. Goldstein reads aloud from Waugh’s unusual disclaimer on the flap of the novel’s British edition. Its author felt he needed to explain, during the more somber decade of deprivation, that Brideshead was not meant to be funny. Waugh also denied direct portraits.“I am not I, they are not he or she” he writes. Goldstein suggests the lady doth protest too much.

“It was shortly before midnight in early March…” Waugh wrote as Charles…“from the quad there were not uncommon sounds of laughter and bilious steps…” Both the author and his character had ground floor rooms. The protagonist meets Sebastian when Flyte leans in the window and copiously vomits – then makes up for it by bringing the stranger into his rarified circle. Whether or not the relationship is sexual has been debated. Critic Paul Buccio calls it the Victorian tradition of “intimate male friendships” which includes “Pip and Herbert Pocket (from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations).

Remembering his first visit to Brideshead, Charles says, “Could I have known then that so dull a thing in other days could be remembered with tears by a middle-aged captain of infantry?” “Before we know what’s happened in the past,” Goldstein remarks, “we know Charles has been ravaged over time…Waugh paints the years at Oxford as golden, yet Sebastian is a dipsomaniac, Charles a not very successful student who has few friends and is a big drinker.”

Neither Charles’ father nor Waugh’s paid their sons much attention. Lord Marchmain leads an entirely separate life on the continent. The author followed suit having six children with his second wife, leaving them to her to raise.

To write, in 1945, about unashamed homosexuality in the 20s was also an anomaly. “Anthony Blanche, who’s a waspish, wry, doomed, Truman Capote-like figure is observed in a very non-judgmental way. And though it’s clear that Julia’s eventual husband Rex doesn’t approve, he doesn’t make an issue of it… Homosexuality was still illegal in England,” Goldstein reminds us.

An attendee asks who the host thinks is responsible for the destruction of the Marchmains.

“The parents do destroy them, but in the book this is mitigated by their faith. It doesn’t make their lives happier, but it seems that the illusion of sadness in life is reduced by it…They pay a price, yet eternal glory makes less tragic the earthly disasters that befall them.”

Bill Goldstein, who possesses a wealth of intriguing, related knowledge, might do better not to refer to page numbers as if we had books in front of us nor should he worry about spoilers as I’d lay odds everyone watching has either read the book or reveled in the series.

A fascinating deep dive.

Photos Courtesy of the 92Y

Brideshead Revisited – Part II on March 2 at 2:30.

Bill Goldstein reviews books for NBC’s Weekend Today in New York and was founding editor of The New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a PhD in English from City University of New York Graduate Center. He is writing a biography of Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown. His book, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature, was published in 2017.