H aving just read something about the new film of Brideshead
Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice as it were — but, when first published, ‘it lost me’, he wrote in the introduction to the revised 1960 edition, ‘such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and’ — perhaps worse? — ‘led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers’.
His confidence had been high when at work on the novel. He called it his ‘magnum opus’ and, if this was partly in jest or self-mockery, it nevertheless seems clear that he believed it to be the best book he had yet written. The later revision, which toned down some of the more lush passages and rhetorical flourishes, testifies to the uncertainty its reception had provoked. I suspect however that many who have read the novel more than once couldn’t say with much assurance which version they had read on each occasion.
No doubt the new film will again lead to articles in which the presumed originals of Waugh’s characters are identified. There may be fewer now than when the Granada version was shown on television, if only because the passage of time means that the originals are themselves mostly forgotten, while the characters on whom they are supposedly based retain their vitality. Who, apart from scholars of political history, now knows anything about Brendan Bracken (model, in part anyway, for Rex Mottram)? Who cares which of Waugh’s Oxford friends gave rise to Sebastian Flyte, Anthony Blanche and the Wykehamist Collins, never (I think) granted a Christian name? They are all dead, while the novel, gloriously, lives.
One reads, without surprise, that the new film plays up the sex and plays down the religion. As to the former, Waugh himself chafed against the conventions of the time in his diary: ‘I feel very much the futility of describing sexual emotions without describing the sexual act. I should like to give as much detail as I have of the meals to the two coitions — with his wife and Julia. It would be no more or less obscene than to leave them to the reader’s imagination, which in this case cannot be as acute as mine.’ As for whatever there may have been of a sexual relationship between Charles and Sebastian, reportedly made explicit in the movie, all we are told is that its ‘naughtiness’ was ‘high in the catalogue of grave sins’.
To play down the religious element is a different matter. It’s to distort the book and ignore, even betray, Waugh’s purpose. Admittedly many have loved the novel while paying little heed to ‘the twitch upon the thread’; others have resented it or been made uncomfortable by it. Admittedly again one may argue that Brideshead is one of those works of art which escapes their authors’ purpose. You may even read it as an unconscious indictment of Catholicism — a religion which, as the story unfolds, seems to destroy ordinary human happiness. Though Charles himself has been driven to accept the faith, he tells Hooper that he is ‘homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless’. The one hint that he is not a broken man comes in the last sentence of the novel when, returning from his visit to the chapel, he is told that he is ‘looking unusually cheerful today’. But one can’t say that their religion makes any of the family, except Cordelia, happy.
For Waugh this is irrelevant. A settled faith, like Cordelia’s or old Mr Crouchback’s in the Sword of Honour trilogy, may bring you serenity, even ordinary everyday happiness, but that is a matter of fortune. Faith means obedience to God’s will. As Julia in her last conversation with Charles says, ‘the one unforgivable thing’ is ‘to set up a rival good to God’s’. If acknowledging this deprives you of the happiness and love you seek, so be it. Life is preparation for death.
This is a bleak message for those who do not share Waugh’s faith. Yet, though many readers have probably felt dismayed, even cheated by the ending, and Julia’s rejection of Charles — even though Julia herself is perhaps the only character in the novel who never comes convincingly to life — I doubt if anyone has ever thought of Brideshead as a bleak or depressing book. For this is the paradox of art: that whatever its ostensible message, the true work of art enriches our experience of the world we live in and, in doing so, offers delight. Something to remember in our time when so many self-styled artists set out to shock rather than to please. ❑
Allan Massie
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