Books

The Permanent Adolescent

His vices made Evelyn Waugh a king of comedy and of tragedy
 
by Christopher Hitchens
 
.....
 

ven as George Orwell was dying, in 1949, he continued to wrestle with the last book review to which the life of the freelance hack had condemned him. Dogged to the final deadline, he also made some more-general notes about that novel's author. The book was Brideshead Revisited, and the author was Orwell's exact contemporary, whose centennial is also being observed this year. We now have Orwell's fragmented, unfinished comments on Evelyn Waugh, and they certainly infuse me with a strong wish to have been able to read the completed essay.

Within the last few decades, in countries like Britain or the United States, the literary intelligentsia has grown large enough to constitute a world in itself. One important result of this is that the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole. To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy. It is nonsense to pretend, for instance, that at this date there is something daring and original in proclaiming yourself an anarchist, an atheist, a pacifist, etc. The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing, is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system. In 1895, when Oscar Wilde was jailed, it must have needed very considerable moral courage to defend homosexuality. Today it would need no courage at all: today the equivalent action would be, perhaps, to defend antisemitism. But this example that I have chosen immediately reminds one of something else—namely, that one cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.

Analyse "Brideshead Revisited." (Note faults due to being written in first person.) Studiously detached attitude. Not puritanical. Priests not superhuman ... But. Last scene, where the unconscious man makes the sign of the Cross. Note that after all the veneer is bound to crack sooner or later. One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up.

Conclude. Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.

"The Welsh character is an interesting study," said Dr Fagan. "I have often considered writing a little monograph on the subject, but I was afraid it might make me unpopular in the village. The ignorant speak of them as Celts, which is of course wholly erroneous. They are of pure Iberian stock—the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe who survive only in Portugal and the Basque district. Celts readily intermarry with their neighbors and absorb them. From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations. In Wales there was no need for legislation to prevent the conquering people intermarrying with the conquered ..."

Much of the remainder of Waugh's iridescent first novel is imbued with the same breezy, heartless spirit, which recurs memorably in Black Mischief, Scoop, and The Loved One. And most of the delicious elements that were his hallmarks are present from the beginning. There is an innocent abroad; one might call him Candide if the Voltairean association were not obtuse. There are many ancillary characters who act without conscience and don't mind admitting it, and who don't seem to suffer in consequence. (The awful subtexts of Decline and Fall are pederasty and prostitution, and I remember being quite astounded when I was first introduced to the novel, at the age of twelve, by a boarding-school master who later had to be hastily taken away.) There is a fine English country house that is threatened with decay or demolition—in this instance the Tudor mansion King's Thursday, to be ravaged by a Bauhaus barbarian.

That last observation prompts another—namely, Waugh's familiarity with the outlines of the emerging modernity that he came to detest. Aesthetically he was one of the earliest to register the effect of T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land. In Brideshead Revisited, Anthony Blanche reads the Tiresias section of that poem through a megaphone; the title of A Handful of Dust is annexed directly from one of Eliot's more ominous stanzas (the whole stanza appears on Waugh's title page).

This brings us eventually to the matter of Roman Catholicism. In Decline and Fall, Waugh treated all devotional matters as the raw material of farce. But the concept of a capricious cosmos was already jostling in his mind with the notion of original sin. Thus, in that book a little boy named Lord Tangent (the son of Lord and Lady Circumference: Waugh both ridiculed and revered the nomenclature of English nobility) is grazed by a bullet during a sporting event, is reported as having had his foot turn black, and is subsequently said to have suffered first amputation and then death. All this is deadpan, callous humor, most of it offstage, as if Waugh half believed in those Fates that animated Greek drama and did not stop to explain themselves. As his work progresses, however, dreadful outcomes seem to be connected to a warped idea of divine justice. Basil Seal, in Black Mischief, doesn't actually know that he is eating his old girlfriend at a cannibal repast, but it's in the ironic nature of things that he should be dining in this way. In Brideshead, Sebastian Flyte squanders his beauty and charm on alcohol and indigence, and eventually in masochistic self-sacrifice, because he has been rashly fleeing the vocation for the priesthood that his elder brother would have so humbly welcomed.

augh was not a mere propagandist, and we would not still be reading him if he had been. The ends that he reserves for the meek and the worthy and the innocent are condemnations of the worldly and the vain, as surely as in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but they are also highly diverting for their own sake. William Boot, in Scoop, is given a thorough drubbing by reality the moment he risks leaving the shelter of Boot Magna Hall, his bucolic den. Tony Last, in A Handful of Dust, is a doomed man once he agrees to give up his country seat of Hetton and embark on a venture of overseas exploration. The element of what we glibly call noir is a fluctuating one: both Boot and Last (cobbler's names) are treated with extraordinary cruelty by the women they love, but the outcomes are arranged along the spectrum between pity and terror. Waugh's mastery is most often shown by the light flick with which he could switch between the funny and the sinister. And the delicacy of this touch is shown by the breathtaking deftness with which he handled profane subjects. I have already mentioned that the gross pedophilia of Decline and Fall is so artfully suggested that an adolescent might read it unawares. And many adult reviewers of Brideshead have somehow managed to describe it as a languorous evocation of the "platonic" nature of English undergraduate affection.

But toying with his innocents, and showing how cleverly and suddenly their creator could bring them low, was for Waugh part of a serious mandate. He wanted to bring the Book of Job to life for those who had never read, or who feared, it. And he chose a time—the mid twentieth century—when the Church he had joined was very plainly marked not just with a nostalgia for the days of Thomas More or even of Thomas Aquinas but by a reactionary modernity of its own. It is for this reason, I propose, that Waugh and Eliot still seem fresh while G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc appear quaint and antique. The plain fact is that both felt and transmitted some of the mobilizing energy of fascism.

The tweedy, fogy types who make an affectation of Waugh are generally fondest of his almost camp social conservatism: his commitment to stuffy clubs, "home" rather than "abroad," old clothes, traditional manners, ear trumpets, rural hierarchy, ancient liturgy, and the rest of it. Their master ministered very exactly to this taste in the undoubted self-parody that adorns The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and is titled "Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age."

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz—everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the thirties: "It is later than you think", which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr Pinfold thought.

His face eventually grew to fit this mask, but Waugh had been very much "of" the Jazz Age, and brought it hectically to life, most notably in Vile Bodies and Brideshead. Sexual experiments, fast cars, modern steamships and aeroplanes —these, plus a touch of experience with modern warfare, gave him an edge that the simple, fusty reactionaries did not possess. Thus he celebrated Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia as in part a victory for progress and development, defended Franco's invasion of Spain as a stand for tradition and property, and, in his travel book Robbery Under Law, denounced the Mexico of Cárdenas as an anti-clerical socialist kleptocracy. On some things he was conservative by instinct. (He always abominated, for example, the very idea of the United States of America.) But the dynamic element in modernism was not foreign to him, much as he later liked to pretend otherwise. And he made excellent use of this tension in his writing.

nother tension or contradiction also occurs in both the life and the work. Waugh was a celebrated misanthrope and an obvious misogynist, capable of alarming and hateful bouts of anger and cruelty toward friends, children, and colleagues. When his friend Clarissa Churchill married a divorced man, he wrote to her saying that she had deliberately intensified "the loneliness of Calvary." During his wartime service—which, it must be said, was often conspicuous for its gallantry—he almost had to be protected from assassination at the hands of the soldiers under his command. Permanently injured by the flagrant adultery of his first wife, and almost certainly a badly repressed homosexual, he made a living example of Cyril Connolly's "Theory of Permanent Adolescence," whereby Englishmen of a certain caste are doomed to re-enact their school days. The vices of the boy are notably unappealing in the grown man, and Waugh was frequently upbraided for the apparent contrast between his extreme nastiness and his ostentatious religiosity. To this he famously replied (to Nancy Mitford) that nobody could imagine how horrible he would be if he were not a Catholic. A nice piece of casuistry, but not one that bears much scrutiny. In at least two cases—his support for the Croatian Fascist party during his wartime stint in the Balkans, and his animosity toward Jews—there was a direct connection between his spleen and his faith. And in at least two of the novels, Helena (which is based on the life of the early Christian empress of that name) and Brideshead, the narrative is made ridiculous by a sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural. This is what Orwell meant by the incompatibility of faith with maturity.

A further proof of this point, from a somewhat different angle, might be Waugh's lamentable inability to write about sex, along with his insistence on trying to do so. A properly reticent traditionalist should have avoided the topic altogether, or dealt with it by the faintest possible allusion. Waugh once tried to take refuge in a Jamesian hideout, stating rather too finally that "our language took form during the centuries when the subject was not plainly handled with the result that we have no vocabulary for the sexual acts which is not quaintly antiquated, scientific or grossly colloquial." Never mind what Chaucer or Shakespeare or Swift or Burns or Byron might have made of that piece of evasion; the fact is that Waugh knew his readers and also knew that they employed pungent and emphatic and sometimes hilarious words for the obvious. Thus there is no conceivable excuse for passages like this one:

It was no time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with the swallow and the lime-flowers. Now on the rough water there was a formality to be observed, no more. It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed.

The silk rustled again as though falling to the ground. "It's best to make sure, isn't it, darling, before we decide anything? It may just be an idea of yours that you're in love with me. And you see, Paul, I like you so very much, it would be a pity to make a mistake, wouldn't it?"

No sign or hint betrayed their distress but when the last wheels rolled away and they mounted to their final privacy, there was a sad gap between them, made by modesty and tenderness, which neither spoke of except in prayer. Later they joined a yacht at Naples and steamed slowly up the coast, putting in at unfrequented harbours. And there, one night in their state room, all at last came right between them and their love was joyfully completed.

"I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence ... We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world-order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions."

For the generation that was young in the 1920s and 1930s, and for whom Waugh was in some ways the blithe spirit, the unresolved question was this: Were they living in a postwar world or a pre-war one? The suppressed hysteria of this time—the echo of the preceding bloodshed and the premonition of more impending—was never captured better, except perhaps by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

f one adopts Graham Greene's distinction between "novels" and "entertainments" in his own fiction, and applies it experimentally to Waugh, then the two world wars become the crucial points of reference. Brideshead was published toward the end of World War II, but it evokes almost to perfection the atmosphere of Oxford just after World War I, populated by young men who are acutely conscious of having barely missed the great test of combat. This type or "set"—Paul Pennyfeather, Adam Fenwick-Symes, Ambrose Silk, Basil Seal—provides the figures of the "entertainments." Charles Ryder, in Brideshead, is no longer young and epicene when he becomes a junior officer and has to embrace responsibility. Put Out More Flags concludes with many callow and superficial former partygoers behaving better than might have been expected of them (if only to point up a contrast with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, "Parsnip and Pimpernell," who committed what was to Waugh a double offense by avoiding military service and emigrating to America). Dennis Barlow, the cynical protagonist of The Loved One, has learned the craft of poetry in the British Army from 1939 to 1945. (I should add that Waugh's Catholicism, however lightly or invisibly worn, was obviously a stylistic and aesthetic advantage in that novel. It enabled him to confront the sheer wasteland of a Hollywood funeral industry that idiotically, hedonistically, denied death.)

Thus, the summa of Waugh's effort is probably rightly held to be the wartime trilogy that he began to compose in 1951 and completed a decade later. Collectively titled Sword of Honour, this consists of Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender or (in the U.S. edition) The End of the Battle. Unlike many or most of Waugh's "entertainments" (to which I would add some of the imperishable "original sin" short stories, including "Mr Loveday's Little Outing"), this trilogy cannot be read at a sitting. Nor do very many of its passages commit themselves virtually to memory, like the descriptions of William Boot's telegraphese in Scoop, or the Welsh silver band in Decline and Fall. I postponed re-reading it with definite anticipation, which wasn't enough by itself to account for my disappointment.

Of course there is an ancient English Catholic family, with an endangered English country house. The names—Crouchback for the family and Broome for the house—are well up to Waugh's standard. War is coming, and the young Crouchback hears the call of the bugle. But—and this makes him nearly unique in modern English writing—he is not really convinced of the justice of his country's cause. Britain is potentially allied with communism against not just Nazism but Christendom. Guy Crouchback, we learn, is quite reconciled to fascism in Italy, and indifferent to the fate of Czechoslovakia. He is only momentarily cheered by the news of the Nazi-Soviet pact: "The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle."

With these divided loyalties he prays at the shrine of a Crusader knight and sets off to enlist. ("Sometimes he imagined himself serving the last Mass for the last Pope in a catacomb at the end of the world.") Yet, starting out in well-trodden territory, we find ourselves kept within its bounds. The image of the desolate shrine is from the closing pages of Brideshead. Crouchback's disastrous choice of a wife, and her subsequent desertion of him, are very like Waugh's own experience—and reminiscent of the agony faced by Tony Last in A Handful of Dust. Arthur Box-Bender's fatuous complacency about the Nazis is lifted straight from Rex Mottram's in Brideshead ("The Germans are short of almost every industrial essential. As soon as they realise that Mr Hitler's bluff has been called, we shan't hear much more of Mr Hitler") and in both cases the bluster is put into the mouth of a pro-Churchill Tory politician. Having joined his regiment, Guy begins to experience "something he had missed in boyhood, a happy adolescence," which is almost precisely what Charles Ryder says of his affair with Sebastian Flyte. Guy's fellow officer Sarum-Smith makes exactly the calculation about wartime service—that it will do him good when the time comes to return to life in business—that Hooper announces in Brideshead. Guy compares his love for and disillusionment with the army to a marriage, exactly as Ryder does. And this is all in the first eighty pages or so of Men at Arms. In most of the instances I have cited, the preceding books phrased it better.

In Brideshead, Ryder reflects,

Here my last love died ... as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom.

Those days of lameness, he realised much later, were his honeymoon, the full consummation of his love of the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. After them came domestic routine, much loyalty and affection, many good things shared, but intervening and overlaying them all the multitudinous, sad little discoveries of marriage, familiarity, annoyance, imperfections noted, discord. Meanwhile it was sweet to wake and to lie on in bed; the spirit of the Corps lay on beside him: to ring the bell; it was in the service of his unseen bride.

Guy saluted, turned about and departed only very slightly disconcerted. This was the classic pattern of army life as he had learned it, the vacuum, the spasm, the precipitation, and with it all the peculiar, impersonal, barely human geniality.

"Competition for what, Shanks?"

"The slow valse, sir. We've practised together three years now. We won at Salford last year. We'll win at Blackpool, sir, I know we will. And I'll be back in the two days, honest, sir."

"Shanks, do you realise that France has fallen? That there is every likelihood of the invasion of England? That the whole railway system of the country is disorganised for the Dunkirk men? That our brigade is on two hours' notice for active service? Do you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then how can you come to me with this absurd application?"

"But, sir, we've been practising three years. We got a first at Salford last year. I can't give up now, sir."

"Request dismissed, sergeant-major."

In accordance with custom (sergeant-major) Rawkes had been waiting within view in case the applicant for a private interview attempted personal violence on his officer ... And Guy remained to wonder: was this the already-advertised spirit of Dunkirk? He rather thought it was.

"Everything is going merrily on the eastern front."

"Merrily?"

"Wait for the nine o'clock news. You'll hear something then. Uncle Joe's fairly got them on the run. I shouldn't much care to be one of his prisoners."

The battle at Nettuno looks unpromising. It is hard to be fighting against Rome. We bombed Castel Gandolfo. The Russians now propose a partition of East Prussia. It is a fact that the Germans now represent Europe against the world. [Italics added]

The long and didactic closing stages of Sword of Honour are amazingly blatant in the utterance they give to this rather unutterable thought. Guy Crouchback regards the Yugoslav partisans as mere cyphers for Stalin, sympathizes with the local Fascists, and admires the discipline of the German occupiers. We know from many published memoirs that Waugh himself was eventually removed from this theater of operations for precisely that sort of insubordination. We also know that his first writerly trip after the German surrender was to observe the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He left the city after only two days, "finding the reality tedious," in the words of his biographer Selina Hastings. So it is slightly unsettling to find Guy Crouchback performing an act of mercy and piety, which his creator never even attempted. In a protracted and sentimental episode at the close of Sword of Honour he devotes himself to the rescue of a group of displaced Jews, and persists in this quixotic policy despite every variety of British official discouragement. The Jews themselves are never represented except as extras—as Guy's rather bedraggled objects of charity. There isn't any color or life or dignity to them. Is it then mistaken for one to suggest that they are included as a makeweight, or as a clumsy atonement many years later for Waugh's actual views at the time? Whatever may be the case, the passage is one of the most bogus and leaden things he ever wrote, fully materializing Orwell's earlier misgivings. And in this instance it is the suspect politics that directly occasion and condition the bad writing—which is to say, they negate the whole genius of Waugh in the first place.

any literary careers are doomed to go on slightly longer than they should, and to outlive the author's original engrossing talent. Waugh himself lived to lament the Second Vatican Council and to deplore the abolition of the Latin mass—which meant that he became not more Catholic than the Pope but more curmudgeonly than his own confessors and more conservative than the Church itself. This has the accidentally beautiful result of making Sword of Honour into a literary memorial not just for a lost world but for a lost faith. In Catholic doctrine one is supposed to hate the sin and love the sinner. This can be a distinction without a difference if the "sin" is to be something (a Jew, a homosexual, even a divorcée) rather than to do something. Non-Christian charity requires, however, that one forgive Waugh precisely because it was his innate—as well as his adopted—vices that made him a king of comedy and of tragedy for almost three decades.


The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/05/hitchens.htm.

Evelyn Waugh's novels written before 1945 are typically satiric and filled with dry humor and sarcasm, and many critics view Brideshead Revisited as heralding a change in Waugh's writing style. Brideshead Revisited presents a more nostalgic story based on the main character's memories of a wealthy English Catholic family he befriended before World War II. In an England where most people are Protestant, being Catholic makes the family—despite their land ownership and high social status—a minority, subject to a degree of prejudice. Many of the characters and events in the novel reflect Waugh's life when he was in school and later as an adult.

Brideshead Revisited was the first of Waugh's novels to come to the attention of the American public. In fact, soon after the publication of Brideshead Revisited, Life magazine printed an interview with Waugh. But critics were split over the quality of the novel, and some have criticized it for being too romantic and lacking the brilliance of Waugh's other novels. James Carens in The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh notes that even though the critic and author Edmund Wilson was an admirer of Waugh's earlier works, he condemned Brideshead Revisited as a "disastrous" novel. In contrast, Carens notes that the review in Catholic World magazine praised the novel, calling it "a work of art."

The Pre-War Years and World War II
The book's events take place between 1922 and World War II. Charles Ryder's generation at Oxford was one that found itself too young to fight in the first war, but well into its thirties by the time the Second World War erupted. Throughout the body of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh indicates that something is brewing outside the walls of the stately mansions and colleges where most of the novel's actions take place. Europe, between World War I and World War II, was a place of both great prosperity and dismal poverty, of social innovations and political disarray.

As an adult, Cordelia serves as a nurse during the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. This war...

This is a free excerpt. For the full page get the:

Brideshead Revisited Pass

Point of View
Brideshead Revisited is written completely from the first person point of view; that is, solely through the eyes of Charles Ryder. Charles is the only one telling the story, so the reader must decide whether he is a reliable or an unreliable narrator. Are his impressions of the events and characters in the story to be believed?

In general, Charles is a trustworthy narrator. He does not obviously exaggerate or provide unbelievable information. But, when only one person is telling a story, that person's background and experiences color the telling of the tale. In Charles' case, his childhood was a serious one, with very little happiness. His mother died when he was young and his father pays...

Prologue
In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder is a middle-aged captain in the British Army during World War II, stationed in the Scottish countryside in 1942. He organizes his troops to move them to another location via train overnight. When the sun comes up, he realizes that the new encampment is in England near a mansion whose owners he once knew.

Chapters One-Four
In 1923, Charles is at Oxford studying history, and in his third term he meets fellow student Sebastian Flyte, the son of a wealthy Catholic family, who carries around a stuffed bear named Al. Sebastian asks Charles to lunch with his friends (including Anthony Blanche), who are witty and worldly. Sebastian later takes...

Evelyn Waugh's novels written before 1945 are typically satiric and filled with dry humor and sarcasm, and many critics view Brideshead Revisited as heralding a change in Waugh's writing style. Brideshead Revisited presents a more nostalgic story based on the main character's memories of a wealthy English Catholic family he befriended before World War II. In an England where most people are Protestant, being Catholic makes the family—despite their land ownership and high social status—a minority, subject to a degree of prejudice. Many of the characters and events in the novel reflect Waugh's life when he was in school and later as an adult.

Brideshead Revisited was the first of Waugh's novels to come to the attention of the American public. In fact, soon after the publication of Brideshead Revisited, Life magazine printed an interview with Waugh. But critics were split over the quality of the novel, and some have criticized it for being too romantic and lacking the brilliance of Waugh's other novels. James Carens in The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh notes that even though the critic and author Edmund Wilson was an admirer of Waugh's earlier works, he condemned Brideshead Revisited as a "disastrous" novel. In contrast, Carens notes that the review in Catholic World magazine praised the novel, calling it "a work of art."

When's it on? Send to a friend 22 years in the life Based on Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, this 11-part adaptation explores 22 years in the life of Captain Ryder. The story centres on his relationship with a devoutly Catholic (and awfully rich) family who inhabit Brideshead Castle. Who makes it great? The wonderful Laurence Olivier does a classic turn as Lord Marchmain, while Jeremy Irons play Captain Ryder and Anthony Andrews appears as his best friend, Sebastian Flyte. Jane Asher plays Ryder's love interest. The relationship is rocky because of their conflicting religious and social backgrounds. Pat-a-cake Jane Asher also appeared in Alfie as Annie, one of Michael Caine's many 'love' interests. She's still acting, but she also writes recipe books and runs a company that makes party cakes for special occasions. If you have need of a fancy party cake, why not get Jane Asher to bake it? Six degrees Waugh once said that fewer than six Americans would understand Brideshead Revisited. This wasn't Waugh's subtle way of calling Americans stupid (we think) but rather a comment on the class issues, religious pressure, social obligations and culture that create conflict in the story. Little did he know that Americans (and people from all over the world) would go on to read and reread the work, studying it and writing numerous papers and treatises about it. It's also unlikely he expected an internationally acclaimed mini-series to be made from it. All about Evelyn Waugh started out as a satirical novelist and had published his most well known comic work, Vile Bodies, by the time he was 27. (Stephen Fry recently adapted the book into the film Bright Young Things.) His early novels tended to satirize the upper classes while later novels, like Brideshead Revisited, tackled the role of religion in the modern world. A man's home is his castle Castle Howard was a vital part of the production, standing in for the fictional Brideshead Castle. The stately home has been owned by the Howard family for 300 years and is often hired out to film companies. It has doubled as the Kremlin, appeared in Barry Lyndon and Twelfth Night and its own six-part documentary, A Year in the Life of Castle Howard.

Mortimer's most famous creation is a character named Horace Rumpole, a barrister whose specialty is defending those accused of crime in London's redoutable hall of justice, the Old Bailey. Mortimer created Rumpole for "Rumpole of the Bailey", a 1975 episode of Play For Today; Played with gusto by Leo McKern, the character proved popular, and was spun off into a Rumpole of the Bailey television series for Thames Television and a series of books (all written by Mortimer). In September - October 2003, BBC Radio 4 broadcast 4 new 45-minute Rumpole dramatizations by Mortimer starring Timothy West in the title role.

Brideshead Revisited is a novel by Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It has become well-known to modern audiences as a result of the ITV drama serialisation of 1981, produced by Granada Television.

Warning: Plot details follow.

After a distasteful chance first encounter, protagonist Charles Ryder, a student at Oxford, and Sebastian Flyte, fellow student and the younger son of an aristocratic family, become fast friends. Sebastian takes him to the palatial home of his family, Brideshead, where Charles eventually meets the rest of the Flyte family, including Sebastian's sister, Julia.

Sebastian's family are Catholic, though scandalously, his father, Lord Marchmain, has left his mother and gone to live in Venice with a mistress. Religious considerations arise frequently among the family, and prove to govern the details of their lives as well as the content of their conversations, all of which surprises Charles, who had always assumed Christianity to be without substance or merit. Sebastian, in some ways a troubled young man, learns to find greater solace in alcohol than in religion, and descends into that vice, drifting away from the family over a two-year period, which occasions Charles' own estrangement from the Flytes. Yet Charles is fated to re-encounter the Flyte family over the years, and eventually forms a relationship with Julia, who by that time is married but separated. Charles plans to divorce his own wife so he and Julia can marry, until Julia, motivated by her father's deathbed return to the Catholic faith, decides that she can no longer live in sin, and indeed can no longer contemplate marriage to Charles. Lord Marchmain's reception of the sacrament of extreme unction also influences Charles, who was "in search of love in those days" when he first met Sebastian, "that low door in the wall...which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden," a metaphor that informs the work on a number of levels.¹ Waugh desired that the book should be about the "operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters."

During the Second World War, Ryder, now an army officer and an architectural artist, is billeted at Brideshead, once a home to many of his affections. It occurs to him that builders' efforts are not in vain, even when their purposes may appear, for a time, to be frustrated.

The book was adapted for television by John Mortimer, starring Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte, Laurence Olivier as Lord Marchmain, Claire Bloom as Lady Marchmain, Diana Quick as Julia Flyte; also starring Phoebe Nicholls, John Gielgud, Nickolas Grace, and Charles Keating. The Oxford scenes were filmed in Oxford colleges. The location for Brideshead was Castle Howard in Yorkshire. Scenes on the deck of a Transatlantic liner were filmed aboard the QE2.

External links

• A Companion to Brideshead Revisited (http://www.abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk/Brideshead.html) (adapted for both book and serialisation)

¹ (p. 31, 1946 edition, Little, Brown and Company, Boston; for modern edition see ISBN 0316926345).

Charles Ryder is a captain in the British Army in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War. He is in command of a company of soldiers but he is weary and disillusioned. Life seems to consist of repeated motiveless moves around the country; he is divorced and apparently friendless. Even the army, which once seemed to offer the certainty of valuable activity, holds no attraction for him now. It is commanded by shallow, ignoble and vindictive men like his new Commanding Officer. Ryder is also sceptical about the future of Britain. It seems to lie in the hands of weak-spirited, muddle-headed men like his subordinate officer, Lieutenant Hooper.

As the regiment travels in a train from Glasgow in the middle of winter, Charles does not even bother to find out where they are going. So when, early next morning on their arrival in a large area of parkland, he is told the name of the estate, it is as if a window in his mind, long shuttered, has flown open. Their new camp is at Brideshead Castle; and he has been there before.

Charles remembers how he first came to Brideshead twenty years before on a beautiful, warm summer’s day. It was owing to a remarkable friendship that had developed between him and Lord Sebastian Flyte, whose family lives at Brideshead.

When Charles went up to Oxford University as a callow youth in 1922, he was, as students usually are at first, conscientious in his work and moderate in his wishes. His cousin Jasper Ryder gave him good advice which would have led him along a safe path of meritorious behaviour to a satisfactory outcome and prepared him for leading a life of public service. He retained a few friends from school and at Oxford made a few more, and joined earnestly in discussion groups with some of the serious men.

But, not fully recognised even by himself perhaps, Charles was an artist. He sensed there was far more to be learned and experienced at Oxford. The opportunity to participate in a different life was offered when one night a young man in a rowdy party was sick through the window of his room in college - but from the outside in. The following day this young man, Sebastian, sent many bunches of flowers in apology and invited Charles to lunch with him in his college, Christ Church.

There Charles met students who lived very differently. They dedicated themselves to enjoying life, and were unashamed of exerting their privileges to do so. He met not only Sebastian, but also Viscount ‘Boy’ Mulcaster, a man of little brain, and Anthony Blanche, a bisexual aesthete who had travelled the world and had many astounding experiences. Quickly Sebastian and Charles found that they were compatible and soon they were inseparable.

One day Sebastian borrows a motor-car and drives Charles to Brideshead, which lies nearly a hundred miles from Oxford. He wants to visit his old nurse Nanny Hawkins, who has retired but has been invited to continue living in her own room in the castle. Brideshead is not really a castle but a sixteenth/seventeenth century palace with a dome and later additions. It stands in its own extensive grounds with three lakes and a fountain. Charles, his artistic instincts aroused, wants to see over the whole building but Sebastian shows him only a closed-up room and then the chapel, a striking example of late nineteenth century architecture and decoration but in its garishness entirely different from the rest of the castle. They get away just in time to avoid meeting Sebastian’s sister Julia. Sebastian does not want Charles to meet her or the rest of his family because, he says, he fears they will take Charles away from him with their charm and attractiveness.

III

Cousin Jasper notices that Charles is getting into a bad set and comes to warn him against them. He notices how the appearance of Charles’s room has changed and how Charles is leading a life of expensive luxury. But he is unable to influence Charles at all.

A more serious warning comes from Anthony Blanche who, to Charles’s discomfort, invites him to dinner and a private talk at a nearby hotel in Thame. Blanche has noticed that Charles is an artist and wants to warn him not to let simple English virtues and characteristics, like charm, wash away his talent. In particular he warns against letting Sebastian, a negligible companion for an artist, take over his life and guide his interests. The rest of the family, Blanche says, is quite as remarkable as Sebastian and must be avoided. Charles is thoroughly rattled by this monologue and is relieved to find out from Sebastian the following morning that a lot of Blanche’s facts are very dubious.

IV

At the end of the summer term Charles returns home having spent all the money his father had allowed him - and much more. He lives in a quiet part of London with his father and two elderly servants, his mother having died as a nurse looking after Serb casualties in the First World War. He cannot do much in the vacation without more money, but his father feels he has given enough (as indeed he has) and refuses to understand his son’s plight. Instead he tries to drive his son away from the house in numerous little ways, for in his middle age he has grown odd and reclusive.

Finally Charles is rescued by a telegram from Sebastian, urgently summoning him to Brideshead after he has suffered what he calls a grave injury. Julia meets him at the railway station and tells him that the injury is simply the cracking of a small bone in his foot caused by a fit of temper on the croquet lawn. She is pleased to see Charles arrive because otherwise she would have had to stay to look after Sebastian herself, none of the rest of the family being at home.

V

After Julia has left, Charles and Sebastian get down to enjoying themselves at Brideshead while Sebastian recovers from his injury. They taste the fine wines and excellent cuisine of the house, and Charles practises his art. He draws the great fountain and paints a mural in the Office which he thinks is surprisingly successful.

During his visit Charles realises that Sebastian is a Catholic to a degree which surprises him. He seems to have a simple faith bordering on childishness at one moment, and at others an approach which appears to be a flight from his religion.

Charles finds out more about the family. Sebastian’s father, Lord Marchmain, had married Lady Marchmain late in the nineteenth century and they had had four children. He had gone off at the age of nearly fifty to fight in France in 1914 and had never returned home. He had stayed in Europe and now lived with a mistress. His children had grown up without him, and their loss was made the greater by the death in the war of all three of their mother’s brothers.

The eldest son, Lord Brideshead, known as ‘Bridey’, had wanted to join the priesthood but had had no real vocation for it. Sebastian is the next child, and then Julia. The youngest, Cordelia, is about twelve and still at convent school. At the time Charles visits Brideshead, Lady Marchmain is in London bringing Julia out into society in her debutante year. This is why Julia was desperate to get back to London.

Charles meets both Bridey and Cordelia at the time of the Brideshead Agricultural Show. Cordelia is a delightful child, but he finds Bridey buttoned-up, very settled in his views and ways, and rather odd.

Sebastian decides to take Charles with him to Venice when he goes to visit his father in September. Since Charles has no money they travel third-class and thoroughly enjoy themselves. Charles finds Lord Marchmain a fine figure of a man, somewhat Byronic in his air. His mistress, Cara, is an elegant, cultured woman, and she happily joins in the sight-seeing that the boys want to do, enlisting the help of a Venetian nobleman she knows.

Late in the holiday, she and Charles have a conversation which reveals to him more of the strange situation of the Flyte family. Lord Marchmain is fleeing from a wife he had loved as a boy and could not as a man, she explains. Cara likes the way that northern European boys develop love for another boy before they mature into love for a woman. Alex (Lord Marchmain) had not done that and had suffered as a result; indeed, she says, he hates Lady Marchmain - and all she had ever done wrong was to love him.

She also points out that Sebastian is a compulsive drinker, and that this weakness will lead to great unhappiness. So will his reluctance to give childhood up : he clings to Nanny Hawkins, he carries his teddy-bear Aloysius around with him still. He does not want to mature.