Why Brideshead Revisited is My Favorite Book

Cheerio my good chaps! I come to you today with a post I wrote months ago and am only just now posting because...better late than never I guess? (Also credit to the ever-thoughtful Katie Hanna whose post critiquing Brideshead, while very very different from this one, prompted me to actually polish this small behemoth up and hit publish.)

There is NO room for any more rambling because the below is very long (I have a lot of gushing to do, okay?), but I have noticed that this is the first time on this new blog that I'm talking about someone else's literary art rather than my own creative writing, so. Cheers to humility. 

There's a lot of books I feel comfortable referring to as "my favorite"--The Lord of the Rings, all of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Great Gatsby, Enemy Brothers, Anne of Green Gables. But if I had to pick just one, and I mean only one, I kind of think it would be Brideshead Revisited, because it turned my soul upside down. Not in a bad way. In a good way, like how G. K. Chesterton talks about St. Francis getting humble in another of my favorite books.

As with Gatsby, Brideshead is a favorite that begs explanation. It's not like LotR where the greatness is just evident for huge masses of humanity, y'know? It's a book that comes with trigger warnings--boring beginning, promiscuity, adultery, alcoholism, depression, no conventionally happy ending, alcoholism, etc. etc. etc. When I tried to summarize it to my dad one time he was like, "it sounds like a soap opera"--to which I could only protest, "but it's a Catholic soap opera."

It is Catholic, profoundly so. And I think it's taught me more, or at least done more for me spiritually, than all the religious non-Scripture texts I've read since. Fiction sticks with you more than non-fiction in certain ways. If only because it gets in by a different route--by striking straight for your heart, instead of just penetrating your brain. (What's the Chesterton quote?--there is a line from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Like that, but with story instead of visual art.)

If you haven't read it, Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's one-book saga about an Anglo-Catholic family living the high life in 1920s-1940s Britain. Lady Marchmain, the staunch and starchy Catholic mother, has an estranged husband living scandalously somewhere on the continent and four children: 

Lord Brideshead (aka Bridey), the quiet eldest son who is perfectly content in his duties both filial and religious and could probably talk to you for six hours straight explaining fine points of Catholic doctrine;

Sebastian, who carries a teddy bear named Aloysius around Oxford with him and incidentally drinks too much;

Julia, the debutante who wants to be worldly but is frustrated in this desire by fear of going to Hell; 

and Cordelia, spunky and stouthearted and entirely happy even when she does get in trouble with the sisters who run her school. 

It would be remiss of us not to mention our narrator, Charles Ryder, who gets to know the family first through his college friendship with Sebastian and later (spoilers) through his infatuation with Julia. He's telling us the story as an army officer in the middle of WWII, looking back on an arcadian era lost in the mists of time.

(I've not actually seen the 1981 movie, but its soundtrack captures the feel pretty well. It's the French horns.)

Anyway at this juncture, I have to break things down by character because words fail me otherwise. (Incidentally, words never fail Evelyn Waugh. He's an aggravatingly eloquent writer; you can think about his sentences, like Fitzgerald's, for hours, and his vocabulary is so extensive it makes me feel downright stupid.)

CHARLES RYDER

Strange, piteous, futile thing!
...human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited--
of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?

Those lines are from Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven," which I will be quoting a lot throughout this post, because in my head, Brideshead Revisted is basically "The Hound of Heaven" in novel form. 

(And that's as simply as I can sum up why I love it so, because Francis Thompson's magnum opus is my favorite poem and I love novels more than poetry, so.)

Anyway if you've not read the poem, you must, and if you have, you know those lines "All which I did take from thee I did but take,/Not for thy harms./But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms?" And "Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest" etc.? THE MOST BEAUTIFUL moment in poetry, I tell you. Possibly in the canon of English literature. Not that I've read it all. Ahem. Anyway that moment only sticks because of the long nauseous heartsickness that precedes it, and because of this moment-- 

Naked I wait thy love's uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
[...]
I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years--
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

And that is where Charles Ryder's narrative is coming from: "naked I stand amid the dust o' mounded years." This whole novel comes from the heart of a human creature who has spent his whole miserable life fleeing from his Creator. Failing to look Life in the eye. Chasing after shadows, grasping after sunbeams.

Charles Ryder isn't the only character in Brideshead who wastes his life racing for worthless prizes, but he is the most extreme example. In Chapter One he's a young Oxford fellow, optimistic about finding happiness here, among his books and schoolfriends. He finds Sebastian. Here, he thinks, is happiness. He chases Sebastian until Sebastian fails him--and that's Part I of the novel. In Part II he's struck by Julia's beauty and chases her until that love fails him; and between parts I and II there's this weird interim where he travels the world, notably South America, making a name for himself as a painter of celebrated and primitive architecture. Which is just kind of odd, for a realistic modern British novel--the hero goes off the charts for a year trooping through the jungles of Brazil or somewhere and we only hear about it in passing? What is this?--Obviously this is an image of the soul's restless flight from God--"I fled him down the nights and down the days."

AND THAT'S WHY THE HORRIFICALLY BORING OPENING IS SO DARN THEMATICALLY IMPORTANT: we see Charles Ryder's pathetic reward for his life's labors before we see the labors themselves. The first thing we know about him is that he is a complete and utter failure--or at least that is abjectly miserable, that his current occupation holds no meaning for him: 

"Here love died between me and the army." 

Which is a weird thing to say, Charles my dude. Until we realize that that little sentence is literally the story of his life. "Here love died between Charles Ryder and x"--his father, Oxford, Sebastian, his wife, his career, Julia--and now, finally, here at the end of all things, the army. 

For an Oxford-educated artist, the army is a strange thing to love. But it's all Charles Ryder has left. And now on this bare hill he doesn't even have that.

"Naked I wait thy love's uplifted stroke."

Charles Ryder is spiritually, mentally, and emotionally naked by the time he's ready to tell us his story, and oh is it a depressing thing to witness.

It is in this state of abject emptiness that he comes face to face, once again, with Brideshead.

It is in this state of nakedness that he revisits his old life. 

SEBASTIAN FLYTE

"All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home"

Sebastian Flyte broke my heart and it hasn't healed, but I mean that in like, the best possible way (i.e. he's good for compassion and empathy etc.). 

So, whereas my appreciation for Charles Ryder is mostly intellectual ("I appreciate you, Evelyn Waugh, you genius") my deep abiding love for Sebastian Flyte is much more emotional ("SEBASTIAN, MY CHILD, COME HERE AND LET ME PROTECT YOU FROM YOURSELF"). He's a thoroughly enchanting character, OK? At least he is for me. When we meet him he's 19 years old and he carries around a teddy bear and his dialogue is just--charming. 

"Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebastian. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."

This kid is just--he's just--well, he's Sebastian. Not the most manly boy at Oxford but there's something about him.

Anyway Sebastian is PRECIOUS to begin with, an amusing and delicate flower that the reader just wants to protect.

And then he develops an alcohol addiction.

And it's...just heartbreaking to watch.

What fueled my initial read of this novel, actually, was the need to find out What Happens to Sebastian. As I've said elsewhere, I started praying for him in church one time, he felt so real.

It's not like Sebastian is the first fictional alcoholic I've fallen in love with--Sydney Carton and Charlie Campbell broke my heart long before he did--but he's the one who most radically affects the way I think about addiction. He himself is a highly romanticized character (see Aloysius), but his drinking problem isn't romanticized at all. It's not quaint or pretty--not by the end. At first, yes, Charles thinks it charming--"ought we be drunk every night?" "yes, I think so"--but by the end it's clear that drink has ravaged Sebastian. It's ravaged his beauty so much that Charles walks away from him, turns his back on the friend that used to be his whole world. "There's no past tense to Cordelia's love," observes Charles at one point, indicating that for his own love, there was a past tense.

But even though Charles turns his back on Sebastian, meaning that for a time at least Sebastian drops out of the narrative, Sebastian himself never drops out of relevance. He's thematically at the heart of the book, and he turns out to be...the most radically hopeful figure I know in fiction.

Because here's the thing: Sebastian is radically broken. Evelyn Waugh doesn't pull any punches about that. Sebastian is so broken that, physically, he will never be beautiful again. The 19-year-old Oxford student with a teddy bear named Aloysius is gone beyond recall. In his place we have a wasted alcoholic old before his time. And physical sickness isn't where the damage stops: Sebastian's willpower has taken a devastating hit, too. Psychologically, he's shattered. As a 20-year-old, his drinking bouts were a choice; now, he can't help himself. He is broken on every level of his person. And that's why Charles turns his back on him: everything he loved about his friend is gone, so to his mind, his friend isn't worth loving anymore. "Human love needs human meriting," as Francis Thompson has it. This is the love of the world: it's conditional. You can't rely on it.

But ultimately Brideshead isn't about the worldly love that always fails. It's about the divine love that never fails. The character who gives us a window into this real love is Cordelia (who we'll cover on her own merits in a minute). Whereas Charles gives up on Sebastian, Cordelia loves her brother relentlessly, not because he's pretty or charming or innocent but because he's a human being with an immortal soul. 

She doesn't pull any punches about how broken her brother is, either. She's probably the one who most bluntly comes to terms with the fact that Sebastian is an alcoholic and he'll probably never be free of that til the day he dies. She envisions--and describes for Charles--a future in which Sebastian does his best to be holy, but cannot enter religious life and so lives on the fringes of a monastery as a tragicomic institution who lives in a cycle of piety, drinking bouts, and penitence.

To which Charles is like, that's horrible.

But Cordelia doesn't think it is. Cordelia lives with a mysteriously deep peace of soul about the whole thing. Sebastian's life, she well knows, is full of suffering and always will be. But that's okay, because "you have to suffer to be holy."

Brideshead is radically in tune with the mystery of human suffering and the Christian dogma that God only allows evil that good may come of it--that He can take the awfullest, dirtiest, most tragic and pain-seared sin and turn it into something intensely beautiful. This is something we can never hope to understand in this life. We will never see it with our poor weak eyes. We have to take it on faith. Cordelia does so. And she does so radically.

See--I think a lot of Christians, and in a special way Catholic Christians, are fairly comfortable with the idea of redemptive suffering, as long as it's physical suffering. We love martyrs, especially red martyrs. We find it easy to accept the fact that burning at the stake is totally worth it with Heaven on the other side of the flames. We know that a life of constant illness can make a person into a great and towering saint, if that person resigns himself to heroic patience. We can accept our cross, even if the cross is cancer. What we have considerably more trouble accepting is suffering of a non-physical nature--mental anguish, spiritual dryness, temptations to sin. Memories of sin. Constant falls into the same habitual sin we've been struggling with for we don't know how long. Being a sinner.

"Three times I begged the Lord about the thorn in my flesh, that it might leave me..."

When suffering is imposed from outside--like the rack, or the flu--we can look at the sufferer across the table or in the mirror and say, "you are undergoing a martyrdom," and there's often great consolation in that. But when suffering seems to come from the inside of the person--scruples, depression, addiction--it's easy to look at the person across the table or in the mirror and say, "What's wrong with you?" We feel like we should be able to fix ourselves--our own brokenness, our own sins.

And the truth is:

we can't.

The truth is, we're such a mess that if it was up to people like Charles Ryder, we'd be left to die alone in some loveless charity ward.

But it's not up to people like Charles Ryder. It's up to an all-loving and all-merciful God. A God who knows, even better than Cordelia, that we're a hot mess and we need love. Even when we don't deserve it, especially when we don't deserve it, because we don't deserve it.

Spiritual, mental, and emotional suffering usually comes with desolation, not consolation. But even desolation is suffering, and suffering, so Mother Teresa has it, is the kiss of God. 

God gives us suffering so that we can put our trust in him rather than ourselves--so that we can come to him and say, "Papa, I need you, I can't on my own." And he'll take us in his arms and give us everything we need--which may not be what we want, not even if what we want is a miraculous cure from an alcohol addiction. He's got us even if we don't look like he's got us. Even if we don't feel like he's got us. When we put our weakness in God's heart--that is what it means to be holy. Otherwise we might forget that we ourselves aren't God.

The link between suffering and holiness is just...so mysterious. It's so different than we think. His ways are not our ways, and our thoughts are not his thoughts. Our job is to trust, and to love. Not to understand stuff. To trust.

Anyway for all the above reasons Brideshead has been intensely therapeutic for myself as a broken human being, but it's also made me much more compassionate for other people, especially those struggling with addiction of any kind. I once heard someone say, "It's not a sin to get drunk, it's a sin to be a drunkard;" but actually that's exactly backwards. It's a sin to get drunk; it's NOT a sin to be a drunkard. For something to be a sin, it has to be a choice. We can only sin if we have free will. So for a 20-year-old Oxford student to get himself drunk every night on purpose--yes, my dear Sebastian, that's a mortal sin. Don't do it. Practice temperance, kids. Don't get drunk. But for a 40-year-old man with a deep-seated decades-old addiction to go on a drinking bout cuz his will breaks down? Only God knows whether that's a sin at all. Stuff like this can have a powerfully destructive power over the human will. And if you no longer have a choice--well, sin is a choice. If self-destructive behavior is no longer a choice, then it's just suffering. And suffering is our ladder to Heaven--if we let it be. As I've said before, Sebastian's later drinking bouts are penance for his earlier drinking bouts.

So...don't judge the guy sleeping it off in the back alley. He might just be suffering. In some mysterious way by the unfathomable grace of God, he might just be a saint.

(Before we move away from Sebastian and good coming out of even moral evil, I should mention that Waugh definitely isn't condoning sin, and in case we don't get that from Sebastian's wasted physical form then we have no choice but to get it from Julia. Julia is the most willful sinner of Lady Marchmain's children, as she gets married outside the church, divorces her husband, launches an adulterous affair with Charles Ryder and encourages him to divorce his wife so he can marry her instead--all of which (except, I suppose, for her divorce, since Biblically speaking her first husband was not her husband) is very much against Catholic teaching, and she knows it. Unlike Sebastian, Julia maintains control of her human freedom throughout the novel and consistently uses it to do bad things, while remaining rich and beautiful in the eyes of the world. She, too, is handled with compassion by Waugh--in many ways I relate to her more than anyone else in the novel--but she clearly is a sinner who chooses to remain in a state of sin, and that's why she's miserable.)

CORDELIA

"I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a Trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity"

Cordelia makes holiness look like something anybody can attain, not just ethereal girl martyrs and men with long beards and high foreheads.

(No disrespect intended to St. Lucy or St. Augustine, two of my favorites, or to the artists who depict them.) 

But sometimes holiness does feel out of reach. Something that doesn't exist for lay people or the modern world. Which is why more recent saints are such powerful ones to make friends with--people like Pier Giorgio Frassati and John Paul II make you realize, gosh, sainthood isn't obsolete or impossible, it's radically relevant. Anyway--Cordelia's like that, but fictional: she makes holiness look feasible. Something for normal people.

Cordelia just...isn't romanticized. At all. When we meet her she's like 11 years old and seems like a regular exuberant kid. She tags along with Charles and Sebastian, often arguing theology with Charles--but she isn't a goody-two-shoes, because for all her handle on the catechism she gets into trouble with the teaching sisters a good bit, and doesn't seem to care. Not to mention the horrible pranks she plays on Julia's horrible boyfriend. She's kind of madcap. Charles enjoys her company. 

And then Cordelia grows up, and when Charles sees her for the first time in years, he's like, "ew." She's not pretty or graceful or successful in any marked way. She's not married and has no prospects of marriage. She doesn't even have the vocation she hoped she might have. She's just...a grown woman who goes around doing volunteer work to keep herself busy.

And then she has that conversation with Charles about Sebastian, which is probably my favorite scene in the whole blessed book. And it just becomes so clear--this girl is grounded. She's living a good life. She knows who she is. She knows what matters. And she's happy.

Cordelia is just...such a peaceful character. She's spunky and exuberant and vivacious, but she can only have that external bubblyness because she's got a deep, deep peace in her soul. "No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I'm clinging." She doesn't need to read Fr. Jacques Philippe's Interior Freedom; she lives it already. She's so placid. And with that in mind, her "meh" response to her teacher's discipline comes into a different light: it's not that Cordelia doesn't care about being good, still less that she's a natural rebel. She cares intensely about being good--but only about being good and not about seeming good. If her conscience is clear before God, she really couldn't care less what other people think about her, even teaching sisters.

That peace of soul and clarity of conscience is something I'd really like to have, y'know? Cordelia is a good reminder that we're not in this thing for human respect. If we're living in God's grace, we should be able to take correction with that grace and move on in the grateful knowledge that we were never perfect to begin with, and all we can do is move forward towards greater perfection with joy.

So there we have it--the biggest (not the only) reasons I love Brideshead Revisited with every fiber of my being. Charles Ryder shows me the ugly reality of sin. Sebastian shows me the mysterious reality of suffering. Cordelia shows me the glorious reality of sanctity. Taken together, these three things help me understand how truly hopeful an affair this life we're living is. We might be as lost as these characters--but it's never too late to turn back to God, and the very moment we do that, everything is worth it. 

We don't have to earn his love. We have it always. We just need to accept it. And sometimes accepting it will really really hurt. Always, accepting God's love demands much of us--turning away from sin, trusting God, forgiving ourselves for past mistakes, realizing we are weak and broken and can't do anything to fix that on our own. Sanctity isn't always easy, depending on your definition of "easy." But it's always simple. Simpler than we often want to make it, I think.

"Naked I wait thy love's uplifted stroke!"

Once we realize our own littleness, then we're ready to fall into God's arms.

You have to suffer to be holy. And once you decide to be holy--that it is Him that you claim for your prize, and Him alone--then suddenly, miraculously, even in the midst of all the wreckage of your sinful past life, once you have Him--

--everything's gonna be okay. 

Well, my dears, I want to know your thoughts! Have you read Brideshead Revisited? Did you like it? (I promise not to come at you with a battle axe if you hated it. A hatchet, maybe, but not a battle axe.)