Brideshead Revisited (Waugh)

Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Evelyn Waugh, 1945
Little, Brown, & Co.
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316042994


Summary
Evelyn Waugh’s most celebrated novel is a memory drama of extraordinary richness and depth. The novel Waugh thought of as his magnum opus, it is the story of the intense entanglement of a young, middle-class Englishman, Charles Ryder, with a wealthy, eccentric Anglo-Catholic family, the Marchmains: in particular, with Sebastian, the flamboyant young man Charles meets at Oxford in the 1920s; and Sebastian’s sister Julia, who will become the great and unrequited love of Charles’s life.

Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the world of Waugh’s own youth, but it is also a story about religious and secular love, about the notions of sin and judgment, guilt and punishment and how, almost unaccountably, they can give shape to one’s life.

By turns romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s familiar satiric exploration of English society and mores, revealing an elegiac, lyrical writer of the most lucid and profound feeling. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 28,1903
• Where—Hampstead (London), England
• Death—April 10, 1966
• Where—Taunton, Somerset, England
• Education—Oxford University


Evelyn Waugh (pronounced Woh) was born in London, the second son of noted editor and publisher Arthur Waugh, He was brought up in upper middle class circumstances in the wealthy London suburb of Hampstead, where he attended Heath Mount School. His only sibling was his older brother Alec, who also became a writer. Both Arthur and Alec had been educated at Sherborne, an English public school, but Alec had been asked to leave early during his final year after publishing a controversial novel, The Loom of Youth, based on the homosexual relationships in his school life. Sherborne therefore refused to take Evelyn and his father sent him to Lancing College, a school of lesser social prestige with a strong High Church Anglican character. This circumstance would rankle with the status-conscious Evelyn for the rest of his life but may have contributed to his interest in religion, even though at Lancing he lost his childhood faith and became an agnostic.

After Lancing, he attended Hertford College, Oxford as a history scholar. There, Waugh neglected academic work and was known as much for his artwork as for his writing. His social life at Oxford influenced Waugh's personal conversion to a more conservative social and cultural viewpoint, and provided the background for some of his most characteristic later writing.

He left Oxford in 1924 without taking his degree. He was briefly apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and afterwards maintained an interest in marquetry, to which his novels have been compared in their intricate inlaid subplots. He also worked as a journalist, before he published his first novel in 1928, Decline and Fall. Other novels about England's "bright young things" followed, and all were well received by both critics and the general public.

Waugh entered into a brief, unhappy marriage in 1928 to the Hon. Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner, youngest daughter of Lord Burghclere and Lady Winifred Herbert, and granddaughter of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon. Their friends called them "He-Evelyn" and "She-Evelyn." Gardner's infidelity would provide the background for Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust. The marriage ended in divorce in 1930.

Waugh converted to Catholicism and, after his marriage was annulled by the Church, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic, daughter of Aubrey Herbert, and, like Waugh's first wife, a granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon. This marriage was successful, lasting the rest of his life, producing seven children, one of whom, Mary, died in infancy. His son Auberon Waugh followed in his footsteps as a notable writer and journalist.

Waugh's fame continued to grow between the wars, based on his satires of contemporary upper class English society, written in prose that was seductively simple and elegant. His style was often inventive (a chapter, for example, would be written entirely in the form of a dialogue of telephone calls). His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 was a watershed in his life and his writing. It elevated Catholic themes in his work, and aspects of his deep and sincere faith, both implicit and explicit, can be found in all of his later work.

The essential issue, he believed, was making a choice between Christianity or chaos. Waugh saw in Europe's increasing materialization a major decline in what he felt created Western Civilization in the first place. His faith and his conviction persisted throughout all the chapters of his life.

At the same time (and perhaps because it integrated both his beliefs and his natural "dark humor"), Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust contain episodes of the most savage farce. In some of his fiction Waugh derives comedy from the cruelty of mischance; ingenuous characters are subject to bizarre calamities in a universe that seems to lack a shaping and protecting God, or any other source of order and comfort. The period between the wars also saw extensive travels around the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Spitsbergen, Africa (most famously Ethiopia) and South America. Sections of the numerous travel books which resulted are often cited as among the best writing in this genre. A compendium of Waugh's favourite travel writing has been issued under the title When The Going Was Good.

With the advent of the Second World War, Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines in 1940. Few can have been less suited to command troops. There was some concern that the men under his command might shoot him instead of the enemy. Later, Waugh was reassigned to the Royal Horse Guards. During this period he wrote Brideshead Revisited.

Brideshead Revisited (1945), is an evocation of a vanished pre-war England. It is an extraordinary work which in many ways has come to define Waugh and his view of his world. It not only painted a rich picture of life in England and at Oxford University at a time (before World War II), which Waugh himself loved and embellished in the novel, but it allowed him to share his feelings about his Catholic faith, principally through the actions of his characters. Amazingly, he was granted leave from the war to write it. The book was applauded by his friends, not just for an evocation of a time now — and then — long gone, but also for its examination of the manifold pressures within a traditional Catholic family.

It was a huge success in Britain and in the United States. Decades later a television adaptation (1981) achieved popularity and acclaim in both countries, and around the world. Another a film adaptation was made in 2008. Waugh revised the novel in the late 1950s because he found parts of it "distasteful on a full stomach" by which he meant that he wrote the novel during the gray privations of the latter war years.

Much of Waugh's war experience is reflected in the Sword of Honour trilogy. It consists of three novels, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961), which loosely parallel his wartime experiences. His trilogy, along with his other work after the 1930s, became some of the best books written about the Second World War.

The period after the war saw Waugh living with his family at Combe Florey, Somerset, where he enjoyed the life of a country gentleman and continued to write. During this period he wrote Helena, (1953), a fictional account of the Empress Helena and the finding of the True Cross, which he regarded as his best work. He also wrote The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), which depicts its hero's steady descent into madness.

Waugh's health and literary output declined in later life. On April 10, 1966, at age 62, he died of a heart attack in his home after attending a Latin Mass on Easter Sunday. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Mr. Waugh is very definitely an artist, with something like a genius for precision and clarity not surpassed by any novelist writing in English in his time. [Brideshead Revisited] has an almost romantic sense of wonder, together with the provocative, personal point of view of a writer who sees life realistically.... The emotional tone and content of Brideshead Revisited are accordingly heightened beyond any Mr. Waugh has acheived before.... Brideshead Revisited is Mr. Waugh's finest achievement.
John K. Hutchens - New York Times (12/30/1945)

A many-faceted book.... Beautifully [written] by one of the most exhilarating stylists of our time.
Newsweek

First and last an enchanting story...Brideshead Revisited has a magic that is rare in current literature. It is a world in itself, and the reader lives in it and is loath to leave it when the last page is turned.
Saturday Review


(Audio version.) In this classic tale of British life between the World Wars, Waugh parts company with the satire of his earlier works to examine affairs of the heart. Charles Ryder finds himself stationed at Brideshead, the family seat of Lord and Lady Marchmain. Exhausted by the war, he takes refuge in recalling his time spent with the heirs to the estate before the war—years spent enthralled by the beautiful but dissolute Sebastian and later in a more conventional relationship with Sebastian's sister Julia. Ryder portrays a family divided by an uncertain investment in Roman Catholicism and by their confusion over where the elite fit in the modern world. Although Waugh was considered by many to be more successful as a comic than as a wistful commentator on human relationships and faith, this novel was made famous by a 1981 BBC TV dramatization. Jeremey Irons's portrayal of Ryder catapulted Irons to stardom, and in this superb reading his subtle, complete characterizations highlight Waugh's ear for the aristocratic mores of the time. Fervent Anglophiles will be thrilled by this excellent rendition of a favorite; Irons's reading saves this dinosaur from being suffocated by its own weight.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider some of these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Brideshead Revisited:

1. Charles Ryder is enamored of the wealth, beauty and privileged life he finds at Brideshead, a paradise, "very near heaven." Yet beneath the surface glamor lie discontent, anxiety, resentment —chinks in the perfect armor of the Flyte family—that presage later problems. Can you identify some of those chinks?

2. What is the reason for Sebastian's decline? Trace its beginnings and the role that Lady Marchmain plays.

3. Why does Julia marry Rex Mottram?

4. The overriding theme of the novel is Catholicism and the opening of one's life to grace. At one point the inevitability of grace is described as the "twitch upon the thread," referring to how a fisherman gently wiggles the line to bring in the catch. You might explore the role that religion (or its rejection) plays in the life (or ultimate fate) of the characters—Sebastian (with his teddy bear), Charles, Julia, Lady Marchmain and her husband.

5. Is Lord Marchmain's deathbed conversion genuine?

6. Critics have found Brideshead Revisited elitist, saying that the work champions the life of the artistocracy over the life of the middle class? Do you find evidence of that in the work? Or is that an unfair assertion.

7. Does Charles's conversion at the end feel convincing to you? Were you suprised?

8. For indepth commentary, read Frank Kermode's Introduction, found on the Alfred A. Knopf site (scroll to bottom of page).

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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