Brideshead Revisited

I had no idea Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited was a religious novel when I picked it up. In fact, I had no idea it was a religious novel until about 50 pages from the end of the book.

When I last met Evelyn Waugh, I was reading A Handful of Dust, a novel in which religion played no part. I was expecting Brideshead Revisited, then, to be something similar, a sort of comedy of the lives of the wealthy in the British countryside. The characters would be similar to real people, but they would be exaggerated to comic effect.

While the characters did indeed make me laugh with their behavior, they were remarkably well developed in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh strove for something much more realistic, and he of course did a wonderful job. Yes, both novels are set in British estates, and both novels deal with the ways of the upper classes, but the content beyond that is starkly different, and I much prefer Waugh's efforts in his later work. The world is so colorfully created, and the characters are delicious in how they act and react to each other.

The big similarity between the novels is their structure. I was in shock for the entire final third of A Handful of Dust as Last wandered through the jungles and died a horrible death. Up to that point, I had thought the novel was about one thing only to discover that it was about something else entirely. I had the same experience in reading Brideshead Revisited. Up until the final section, I thought Waugh was saying something about families and relationships, the way things rise and fall, and how we shape each other. While I was aware that the Catholic belief of the Flytes was important to the novel, I thought it was a device to separate the Flytes from other families, and a tool for talking about the way that religion can pull people apart instead of giving them peace. Then I read the final section and discovered that Catholicism is at the heart of the novel, and that it is held to be something winning. And Sebastian, who was the center of the first half of the novel, becomes little more than a footnote. We hear of him, but never encounter him again. Waugh is very talented at playing with and thwarting my expectations, and possibly yours too.

In the end, we have a novel in which three men have profound encounters with religion and find God when they need him most. Sebastian, bereft of everything, and scraping along the rough bottom of existence, finds God through Kurt, his German friend who allows Sebastian to fulfill a service to someone else, to live beyond himself. Lord Marchmain, a man who never cared for Catholicism, crosses himself on his deathbed, and finds God when he is on the precipice of death. And Charles Ryder, our narrator, goes through the whole novel a non-believer. When he opens the novel he has lost his last love as he realizes that he and the Army have grown apart like estranged spouses. Then in flashback, we see him lose everything else, from Sebastian to Julia. He finds prayer in Marchmain's death scene as he thinks of Julia; he prays for a sign for her sake, to comfort her. And ironically, in answering his prayer, the good Lord separates Julia and Charles forever. Then as the epilogue closes, Ryder stands a shell of a man. He has lost all human love and now all love for the army. It is no coincidence that Ryder is a painter of architecture. He embraces the things created by man, not by God. Even when he visits South America, he paints not the landscape, but the fallen buildings there. Even Anthony Blanche sees his paintings are essentially the same thing. So there Ryder stands at the end of the novel, thinking about the man-made thing that has meant the most to him in his life, Brideshead. He contemplates that the builders had no idea the live their creation would lead. And that brings him to the chapel and the light that burns therein, for there is another creator who knows exactly where his creations go. And the upnote that Waugh ends on is Ryder finding peace in this discovery. Ryder has found God.

There are of course plenty of other characters who would be worth analyzing, but restrictions of time and space in this short blog prevent me from diving into. The minor character that intrigues me most is Nanny Hawkins, the childhood Nanny who dwells in the attic space of Brideshead. Throughout the 20 years that the novel covers, Nanny is forever in her attic window, simultaneously in touch with all the goings on and way out of touch with what's happening below her. She has a view of all, but her eyes are weak. I wonder if she is not some version of God in this novel. And I wonder what it would mean in she were. I don't know if Waugh had a difficult relationship with God. I learned through Wikipedia that he, like fellow countryman Graham Greene (whose The Power and The Glory also deals with Catholicism and the difficulty of believing), Waugh converted to Catholicism as an adult and embraced it fully. So are we supposed to be critical of Ryder's and Sebastian's profligacy of youth? Are we supposed to feel for Lady Marchmain, who is the whipping-girl for all those who have trouble with God? And how odd is it that Lady Marchmain's death comes and goes without fanfare while Lord Marchmain gets and whole section devoted to his dying? If Nanny is like God, then is her fellow counterpart Ryder's father, whom Ryder notes is like Nanny in that they are the only two people who never change. How problematic is Father Ryder as an analogy for God?

A talented writer can take what a more common writer might turn into a tract and turn it into something grand and beautiful. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh have taken a subject that threatens to be made into a sermon and make art out of it, just as Orwell can take a political tract and make a living, breathing story. This was another gem to be discovered thanks to this reading list. Something tells me that Waugh and I would have nothing to talk about if ever we met, and from what I have read about him, I don't even think we would get along. So how talented must he be to create a world and characters, and breathe life into those very things, and weave a story out of them that pulls me in completely when my world view is so different from his? That is the power of literature and art. That is why we read.