Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. It is beloved, but it also provokes antipathy — as it always has. When Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel in 1945 many of his fellow writers reviled it. They, like so many secular contemporary readers, found its Catholicism bizarre, its breathless depiction of the upper classes appalling, and the prose grossly over-stylized. All of this was intentional. Brideshead was supposed to be a door into a lost world.
Brideshead Revisited tells the story of Charles Ryder’s life. It begins in the Second World War, when Charles is a disillusioned middle-aged officer, and then jumps back more than twenty years to Charles’ youthful, homoerotic friendship at Oxford with the beautiful and kind aristocrat, Sebastian Flyte. The first section of the novel takes place in the moneyed dreamland into which Sebastian invites Charles, and the rest is about Charles’ banishment from that place, and his attempts to repossess it. The banishment was precipitated for two related reasons: Sebastian’s worsening alcoholism which Charles abetted, and the family’s vice-like Catholicism both of which repelled Charles, who is an ardent and irascible atheist. It takes him the length of the novel to find his way back to the family, and through them to faith.
Waugh wrote Brideshead towards the end of the Second World War. He took leave from the army and spent six weeks working in a small, old thatched farm with sloping roofs which had been converted into a quiet writer’s hotel in Chagford (near Devon). As with all his novels, Brideshead was produced in an intense, cloistered concentration. The first chapters were written and rewritten as he formed his style, and then the pages flowed like silk.
Waugh wrote at the start of his autobiography A Little Learning that if he had a time machine he would not travel to the future but the past: “To hover gently back through the centuries . . . would be the most exquisite pleasure of which I can conceive. Even in my own brief life I feel the need of some such device.” Brideshead was that time machine: so many of the events of the novel had been his life. Several times the typist had to replace Waugh’s inadvertent use of real names in the manuscript, including his own.
When Waugh published his time machine (it took five months to write in total, after some wrangling about army leave), the reviews were thoroughly mixed. Behind the scenes the literati sniped about its ornate style and rococo syntax. Old-fashioned. Florid. Too many semicolons. (So many semicolons). When Waugh was young, he had written viciously funny books: they loved him for his dark and wicked satire. Now, he seemed to have gone gooey. Like Virginia Woolf spitting rage at T. S. Eliot’s conversion a generation before, the writers felt betrayed. Waugh had gone from wicked social satirist to earnest conservative proselytizer. And worse! He was Catholic. For the literati, this was a double betrayal. An unashamedly aristocratic Catholicism in 1945 was worse than arcane. It was snobbish.
Waugh was not the only one criticized on this basis. In 1954 Elizabeth Jenkins’ novel The Tortoise and the Hare was panned by a BBC audience for being about an upper-middle class family. The culture was turning to Kingsly Amis and the kitchen sink — it had no time for old-fashioned Christian values. But Waugh took things to extremes. He had always been impish, anarchic, and disruptive. Now in what was everywhere called the age of the common man he became reactionary. In 1962, he said that no-one had written about the working classes before the mid-nineteenth century, other than as “grotesques or a pastoral diversion.” Once they were given the vote, “certain writers started to suck up to them.”
Brideshead was disliked by the literati in no small part because of its reverence for the past. Even the admiring reviewers squirmed. Edmund Wilson — who had once called Waugh “the only first-rate comedic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw” got so carried away in the New Yorker that he wrote, quite unforgivably, “his cult of the high nobility is allowed to become so rapturous and solemn that it finally gives the impression of being the only real religion in the book.” (Waugh never forgave Wilson.) The Guardian reviewer said, “I must confess to a strong personal prejudice against his choice of subjects… while I would not fail to admire the brilliance of his writing, I greatly disliked his story.” The TLS condescended to say that “the Oxford scenes . . . are very well done in their way, though it is rather a lordly way.” (Wilson had enjoyed the Oxford scenes too.)
Waugh invited the criticism. He was unabashedly a man of the past, of the high old days, of watercolor landscapes, pre-1880s household technology, and the old religion. He told his wife, Laura, Brideshead would be “a kind of modern Arcadia.”
Had Brideshead been a book about the anxieties of Anglicanism, it would perhaps have been better received. But even among nostalgics, Waugh was unusual: he did not yearn for Arnold’s sea of faith, or even for the simplicity of the pre-Darwinian, pre-geological nineteenth century. Waugh was taking seriously something much less acceptable — and much less understandable — in England. He wanted to return to the true Christendom, to the world before Henry VIII and the desecration of the monasteries. In 1949 he wrote that England had been Catholic for nine centuries, Protestant for three, and agnostic for one. “The Catholic structure still lies lightly buried beneath every phase of English life; history, topography, law, archaeology . . . everywhere reveals Catholic origins.” The truth is that the literati hated Brideshead because it was too Catholic. Waugh’s friend Christopher Sykes said, “‘Roman tract’ is being hissed in intellectual circles.” Nancy Mitford confirmed the point, “Too much Catholic stuff” was the general view on the drinks circuit. A genius had produced a masterpiece and the cultured class couldn’t see its riches through their thick religious bigotry. Such is English cultural life!
The critics’ antipathy echoes today. Even some Brideshead lovers fail to recognize the novel’s careful construction which crescendos in Charles’ religious awakening. The second half is not a disjointed disappointment: it is the realization of Waugh’s artistry. Who else wrote, or could have written, with such charm, such elegance, a novel intended to proselytize for a religion that had been abandoned by the country in which the book was written and takes place? Brideshead is an earnest ode to faith decked out in sumptuous, glittering, beauty and withering wit. No wonder the literati hissed. Waugh showed them their own world — their own youth, glamour, and hedonism — and used it to call them to a religion their ancestors had overturned in a revolution four hundred years earlier.
Readers often grumble that the luscious Oxford section which opens Brideshead gives over to a slower, dimmer setting. Such a bait and switch! Such delicious bait! Why did the author, capable of heaping details about pleasures, art, silk ties, country houses, poetry, and wealth — why did such an author suddenly throw us out of Paradise? Why all this strange religious fervor? Where are the strawberries and champagne? What happened to the madrigals?
Objections are more than aesthetic. Why must Sebastian suffer? Why must Lord Marchmain come home to die in splendour and convert? Why, oh why, must the love stories fail? So many readers find the ending unbearable. One writer I know cried on the underground the last time he read it.
An excellent reappraisal which appeared in the New Statesman in 2023 said Brideshead was “quite inexplicable to non-Catholics.” Even Jeffrey Manly of the Evelyn Waugh Society recommends crossing out the religious parts so you are left with a funny novel. All of this is disastrously wrong. Without the operation of divine grace, Brideshead would be merely a sketch, a series of scenes. What makes the novel great is the power of its ending which vibrates with emotion and fervor. And it cannot work without God. We can only appreciate Paradise in our fallen world.
To understand the morality of Brideshead, one must first understand its style. There is a long tradition of calling the prose purple. As Macolm Bradbury said in 1964 (in a splendid little book about Waugh’s work), “Most critics agree that he piled it on rather.” Rose Macauly called it an “adolescent surrender to glamour.” Recently in the LRB, Seamus Perry called Waugh’s prose “splendid schmaltz.” But Waugh is never purple in the gaudy manner of, say, Laurence Durrell. He writes in the purple not of amethyst and lilac, not the plush, insistent purple of fizzy wigs and velvet cushions, but the great grand purple of crown jewels and Bishop’s robes. His style is not an indulgent deviation from the canonical norm of the good hearty plain style. (Had it been the purple of modernism, the semi-colons of Orlando, for instance, fewer would disapprove.) No: Waugh’s is a High purple.
Waugh had strict beliefs about prose style. Writers, he stipulated, ought to know grammar thoroughly, understand word derivations, and use dictionaries and reference books like Fowler’s Modern English Usage. In the Brideshead chapter of Selina Hastings’ elegant biography of Waugh, she wrote,
Although unmusical, Evelyn had an almost perfect ear for the rhythm and fall of a sentence, and was acutely aware of nuances of style, both his own and of writers whom he admired, such as Ruskin. (“Read a page of Ruskin a day,” was the advice he gave to a conference of young writers in America.) “I am getting spinsterish about style,” he wrote in the middle of February, and a month later, “English writers, at forty, either set about prophesying or acquiring a style. Thank God I think I am beginning to acquire a style.” His own sophisticated style was rooted in a profound understanding of the peculiar grace and flexibility of the English language . . . so careful was he to avoid clumsy or extraneous matter that after reading the day’s work he sometimes found himself having to stretch, rather than prune his material. “It is always my temptation in writing to make everything happen in one day, in one hour on one page and so lose its drama and suspense. So all today I have been rewriting and stretching until I am cramped,” he told Laura.
Waugh’s spinsterish, Ruskinian, lavish, delicate prose was not made for its own sake: it was invoked in service to his moral purpose. He disclaimed all psychological interest (psychology, like cubism and jazz, being a horrid invention of the modern). Instead, as he wrote in a preface to a later edition, Brideshead was about “the operation of divine grace.”
I first read Brideshead when I was sixteen, and then twice more in rapid succession beginning again as soon as I finished. I was mesmerised by those sentences, not “at the level of the sentence,” as is so often said today, but by the accumulated effect, and in service to his cause.
Waugh had been a Catholic for fifteen years when he wrote Brideshead. His conversion was both slow and sudden. His first marriage (to a woman also named Evelyn) smashed up after a few months. He was in the middle of writing Vile Bodies when his wife confessed adultery. All Waugh’s young energy collapsed, and the collapse marks that novel. The first twenty-five thousand words were written in ten days. They brim with the vigor of P. G. Wodehouse. Then she told him. Waugh tried to save the marriage, but the affair continued. The marriage died. Vile Bodies stalled. “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and to live,” he wrote to his friend Harold Acton. The problem seems to have been Waugh’s sexual inexperience. He had no idea she was unhappy. After her desertion Waugh became more and more devoted to his religious ideals, he converted to Catholicism, and his satire sharpened and was newly directed.
He scorned modern values, modern morals, and modern art. By the time of the Second World War, the socialist government, the alliance with Russia, all of which came at the end of two decades of taxes that eroded the upper classes, Waugh’s theme was degradation. His scorn for modernity is amusing, but it is also sincere. Waugh’s novels of the 1930s are vicious.
Waugh fittingly named the hero of A Handful of Dust, which was published in 1934, Adam Last — he was the last English gentleman. And in this novel, as in Brideshead, the question of who inherits the house rumbles through the book and torments the characters. It stood for the question of who would inherit England. And as in Brideshead the beautiful youths decay into chilling, amoral characters. Brenda, Adam’s wife, is especially hateful. Martin Stannard says of this period of Waugh’s writing,
Waugh’s pre-war fiction is not obviously the work of an ardent Catholic. Nevertheless, taking Catholic Christendom as his cultural gold standard, he was effectively writing hilarious ‘Catholic novels’ by negative suggestion: damning a world ignoring the truths of his church.
What changed with Brideshead is that the world he depicted no longer ignored those truths. The subtext was now in bold. This becomes clear in Chapter seven of Vile Bodies, which is where Waugh resumed writing after his divorce. The first time Adam and his wife sleep together — before the marriage — she tells her fiance, “My dear, I never hated anything so much in my life . . . still, as long as you enjoyed it that’s something.” The novel ends with a prediction of major war. It was published in 1930. Waugh had entered a fallen world, and so had his fiction.
But a fallen world has the promise of redemption by the grace of God. No matter how far away we get from His love and mercy, we can be saved. God can draw us back. This is the true theme of Brideshead. Waugh had emerged as a right-wing Catholic apologist in the 1930s, and while it didn’t stop him being the highest earning writer of his generation, it did trim the edges of his appeal. But traditionalism is what sold Brideshead, a book that was always popular with the common reader even when the cognoscenti scowled. For the first time, he was a best-seller in America.
In the dark days of rationing and what Waugh called the “Cripps–Attlee terror” (a reference to the Chancellor and Prime Minister, who were implementing punitive fiscal measures and Socialist policy), Waugh’s lush evocations of the past in the service of the Catholic faith were remarkably popular. Brideshead was a preservation of what people increasingly called, nostalgically, “pre-war,” a phrase that was a mark of quality, of the good old days. What Waugh wrote cantankerously in the Spectator is still felt by many: “It has been the experience of a middle-aged Englishman to be born into one of the most beautiful countries in the world and to watch it change year by year into one of the ugliest.”
Brideshead was a return to beauty, which by now, for Waugh, meant a return to God and the one true church.
Charles’ life shrinks after his break with the Flytes halfway through the story. He becomes a painter of some ability, but not a true artist. (Waugh said in a letter to Nancy Mitford that Charles wasn’t a bad painter as such, but that he was as bad at painting as Osbert Sitwell was at writing. “For Christ’s sake don’t repeat that comparison to anyone.”) He lives a materialistic life: hollow, dissatisfying, glum. When he happens to reconnect with Julia Flyte, Sebastian’s sister, he feels revived. She is a relic from a lost world, the world for which he has longed since losing it.
In this section of the novel, Charles is forced once again to grapple with the Flyte’s faith, and is called upon this time to take it seriously. His ardent, irascible atheism, his contempt for piety, is thrown against Julia’s clear, true faith. When the two of them first met she, too, was an unbeliever. But as their relationship develops she rejoins the fold. He resists at first, grows angry and spiteful, but finally he kneels and he prays.
In this transformation, Charles comes to realize that Sebastian, his friend in hedonism, is and always was a holy person. Sebastian’s sister Cordelia explains this outright. Sebastian has gone abroad, and Cordelia relays that he is living in disgrace. He lives a simple life and regularly seeks solace and care in a monastery where the monks tolerate his alcoholism. At first blush it seems an odd juxtaposition — the alcoholic and the monks — but Cordelia explains:
“The Superior simply said, “I did not think there was anything I could do except pray.” He was a very holy man and recognised it in others.
“Holiness?”
“Oh yes, Charles, that’s what you’ve got to understand about Sebastian.”
Until that point, Charles had not understood. Charles was interested in one side of Sebastian only. Of their time at Oxford, he says: “Sebastian’s faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve.” Their aesthetics, which seem so much the same in the early part of the novel, are fundamentally different. Charles loves the world of material things — paintings, silk ties; Sebastian loves the creation — the ivy, the butterflies.
Beauty for Charles is physical, something to be possessed (a word Waugh repeats at important moments, including the scene where Charles sleeps with Julia and wants to “possess” her like the lands of Brideshead). But that is not how Sebastian understands beauty, and not what it means for him. For Sebastian, beauty is a path to goodness, love, and God. This is why Sebastian’s final fate in the book — living in simplicity amongst the monks — is not a break from splendor but immersion in it. Charles could not comprehend this admittedly unusual spiritualism in his friend. And in this latter section of the book, he returns repeatedly to the memory of his time with Sebastian, trying his best to wrangle understanding from the frayed recollections.
In those early days with Sebastian — and again later with Julia — Charles acidly compared believers’ faith to a faith in magic. The magic motif is woven throughout the novel — language such as “fairies” “ghosts” and “charms,” ironize Charles’ attitude. As Charles leaves Brideshead for what he believes to be the final time after his initial break with the family, he knows even then that he is passing out of a momentous period in his life:
I had left behind me — what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, “the Young Magician’s Compendium,” that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.
“I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses.”
I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.
What did Charles and Sebastian experience in Oxford? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? Yes, all of those things. But now Waugh shows us how that innocent joy was symptomatic of a higher force. A providential pattern emerges.
But even in 1944, this all needed explaining to readers. In a scene where Charles and Cordelia have dinner together, Waugh gives Cordelia a short explanatory speech, to spell out for his secular audience exactly what their ignorance kept them from comprehending.
There’s him gone and Sebastian gone and Julia gone. But God won’t let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk — I mean the bad evening. Father Brown said something like “I caught him” (the thief) “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
In those lines Cordelia traces the arc of the novel. Charles had strayed very far away from God indeed, but by the end he was brought back. A whole section of the novel is called “The Twitch on the Thread” which is Waugh’s way of making sure his intentions are clear.
Waugh’s magical motifs hint that the shallow Charles we met at the beginning of the book is deluded, tricked by the apparition of glamour the way fools are tricked by conjurers. Charles narrates the entire book from where he is at war, when he has become religious, and looking back to the way he was taken in by the delusions of materialism. (“Sebastian’s faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve.” My italics.) On the final page, he goes back to Brideshead, to the chapel, this time: “I said a prayer, an ancient, newly learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp.” Sitting in the chapel, he thinks of the decline of this great work, of the great frost that has come with modernity.
And yet —
Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame — a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.
Compare this to the passage about Oxford from the first section.
Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, like those of a foreign village seen from the slopes outside; new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories.
The image of the lamp has been transfigured, from the secular to the religious, from the temporal to the eternal. Waugh’s novel, Waugh’s time machine, loves both these places. But what animates modern civilization is the way the lights burn and the bells ring as they have done throughout Christendom in the one true church. Again: Waugh’s artistry is all put to the service of redemption.
Charles’ language at the end is devoid of magic and superstition. The ghosts and witches have been banished. His vision of the past is made new, redeemed. It has been repeated throughout the novel that everyone can accept God’s grace. When Charles asks the priest if it is possible for Lord Marchmain to have changed his mind, the priest replies, “Thank God, by His grace it is possible.”
Charles wants to possess Sebastian, and then Julia, and then their house. He must learn that none of these objects — which is how he views each of them — has worth worth valuing. When he finds faith he inherits more than Brideshead. It takes him the length of the novel to absorb this.
Brideshead is a much more forgiving work than Waugh’s earlier novels. Julia is an adultress, like many of his women characters, but she is redeemed. Lord Marchmain is a spineless landlord and an aberrant peer, but he is restored to God. Even Charles, the embodiment of the shallow, grasping culture which Waugh has come to hate, is finally redeemed. There is only one light left burning at the end of this book of shadows: not the lights of Oxford, not the sparkles of diamonds, not the candlelit beauty of Brideshead house, but the lamp in the chapel. Finally the shadows are dispelled. Finally the promise of “Youth? Adolescence? Romance?” is fulfilled.
Morality is indulgent in Brideshead: from the sybaritic life of Oxford to Lord Marchmain being rebarbative to the priest, the word “naughty” is the recurring condemnation. Unlike other Catholics, Waugh wrote sympathetically about homosexuality, and other sins. You can be a sinner and be redeemed.
When Charles describes the lamp in the chapel at the end, I think of Portia. “How far that little candle throws its beam! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” Charles may have sinned, but beauty, love, joy, innocence, all these can be routes to God’s grace.
“The human spirit, redeemed,” Waugh said, “can survive all disasters.”