Books: Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

A month ago or so, one of my coworkers (who is raising his two year old daughter without a television in the house (read: fellow nerd)) asked me what I was reading. A bit abashed, I mumbled something about needing a little break and doing some silly light reading, just a bit of Evelyn Waugh, you know, because I'd been reading Proust and needed something light to break it up, and well, you know. . . Yes, I was babbling, because I was embarrassed, because I had spent the weekend speed-reading through some delightfully frothy English satire, not any more challenging than P.G. Wodehouse, and almost as insubstantial.

He began to laugh; meanwhile I was becoming exceedingly flushed. "Evelyn Waugh? Light? That's amazing. . . you consider Evelyn Waugh light?"

"Well, um, you know. . ." I was a bit lost now, because, well, yes, it was extremely light reading and this is a guy who reads Pynchon for fun, so he should recognize light reading, and, well, now I was just confused. "You know, I mean, it's not trash, but it isn't, well, you know, serious reading. It's pretty frothy. . . a bunch of silly British people capering through London and then mucking about it in the countryside."

He asked me precisely what titles I'd read, and I told him A Handful of Dust and The Loved One (which was particularly silly) and he told me that he'd only read Brideshead Revisited, and had I ever, which I hadn't. "I don't know," he said, "I'm pretty impressed if you think that that's light reading, that's all." And so that was that. A few days later, I conveyed this story to my friend who had actually recommended Waugh in the first place, and asked whether I was missing something, and wasn't Waugh basically the same as P.G. Wodehouse. He insisted that Waugh was bit more "nasty," (actually, an apt description) but then explained that Brideshead Revisited was a dreadfully boring, non-satirical book that, while being his most well-known, was thankfully the single one of it's terrible kind in Waugh's oeuvre. He instructed me never to read it. Therefore, I promptly did.

I wasn't just being contrary, you know. Since one of my reasons for reading is educational, it does me little good to have an experience of an author that is inconsistent with the literary world's experience of that author.

It was a good choice. This is a lovely little plaintive book. It's better than Waugh's frothy satires—not actually that much different in content, actually, only tone. The nastiness has been replaced with poignancy—loss and longing. The capers of the wealthy are still featured with Waugh's particular combination of disdain and sangfroid (Lady Julia is brought as a gift a living tortoise whose shell has been embedded with diamond chips that spell out her initials by her beau Rex Mottram), but Waugh's nimble way with words is even easier to appreciate when one isn't distracted by the utter inanity of satires' necessarily flattened characters.

It's a lost love book that actually tells the story of Charles Ryder's—an Oxford dropout turned painter—loss of not one love but two: his highly-affected college chum Sebastian Flyte (note: extremely close homosocial relationship—tell me—are they gay lovers?) and, later, that chum's sister, Julia. There are marriages, politics, and theological frustrations; alcoholism, aesthetics, and sexuality, too, are treated to Waugh's deft analysis, which never feels of analysis at all. One could, indeed, easily make the argument that the fall of the Flyte family represents the fall of the English manor house, or that Sebastian—beautiful, effete, profligate—himself is a cipher for Brideshead (and the manor's name itself—Brideshead—could be written about in great detail), but one doesn't need to make these arguments.

That Sebastian, by the novel's end, has become a neurasthenic sot, bald, bearded, and living in a Tangerian monastery, seeking the religion of his mother and his Nanny, and that Brideshead itself is serving as camp for English soldiers, one of whom is Charles Ryder (hence the revisiting) at the brink of WWII, its glorious fountain wrapped in chicken wire and filled with cigarettes and sandwich wrappers, renders arguments of that kind rather impotent. And that impotence—the impotence of will, the impotence of love, the impotence of intention—is consistently Waugh's conclusion. Whether the world is nasty or tender (after all, it is both), it is, more savagely, meaningless.