Conversion

The Season of Brideshead
 A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter five
There is an audio discussion of Brideshead Revisited in Slate's book Club. (the link is here if you want to listen to it,) One of the more interesting things in it is that none of the three certified smart people who take part can quite pin down the moment of Charles conversion. They think it must be somewhere in the epilogue. The people who made the recent awful movie are similarly confused and they also leave the question unresolved until the very end.

But we know better don't we? The conversion moment is right here in chapter five.

A little Hegel to lighten the conversation
We've had hints that it is coming and one of the biggest is at the end of Chapter four when Charles says to Cordelia, "You knew I wouldn't understand." That moment would play very differently if Cordelia had said, "I knew you wouldn't understand."

One of Hegel's most famous, and justly so, arguments is that to define a limit is to surpass it. Imagine you and I are standing on the prairie. I know I cannot see forever and you would hardly disagree. But suppose I say, "I can only see as far as that rock over there." Then you'd be inclined to disagree. Even if I said, "I can only see as far as the horizon," you might think, "But you can see the sky behind the horizon."

To set a limit on what we can understand is to build a fence and say. "Beyond this I cannot go." But to build a fence you necessarily learn something about what is on the other side. Charles is setting a limit here: he is saying, "I can understand this far but no further," and, by doing so, he has already allowed himself to peek over the fence he has built. Now it only remains to be seen whether he is willing to climb that fence.

Charles has been accumulating reasons to convert but he has not made the crucial move that will make it possible for him to do so.

The temptation in the desert
I forgot to gloat at Sebastian appearing in his final iteration as a hermit in the desert last chapter, just as the elder Bellini's painting would have it. This is more apropos than it might seem for it connects to the temptation of Jesus in the desert after his baptism. The story gets told in different ways with the temptations happening in different orders in the synoptic gospels (John does not want to admit that Jesus was baptized). It is Luke's version that is interesting here. Luke has Jesus tempted by feast, then by the offer of dominion over this world and finally by testing God so that he may provide a sign. Jesus, of course, passes all three tests with flying colours. Charles fails all three.

1. He feasts on what Julia and Brideshead can offer him.
2. He covets the worldly power as represented by possible ownership of Brideshead and is thrilled at Bridey's misstep that looks like to give it to him.
3. He tests God by praying to him for a sign.

The first needs no further comment.

The second is fascinating as we see Charles quickly go over to the dark side. He glories in Bridey's defeats, talks of "mumbo jumbo" and "witch doctors". He says he is doing this because he fears that religion will cast a dark cloud over he and Julia but everything he does angers her. He is not so stupid that he could not figure out he would be further ahead if he just shut up about it. Charles is won over not just by a desire to have the house but by a desire for worldly power.

Finally there is the request for a sign. This comes in a moment that might initially seem an ascent to holiness but is actually a  descent into sinfulness for it is only when Charles is all the way down that his conversion takes place. (And we will remember Charles' earlier discussion of his love for Sebastian and his being unable to decide whether it was an ascent or descent.)

Here is the descent:

Then I knelt, too, and prayed: 'O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.' ....

I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd. I prayed more simply; 'God forgive him his sins' and 'Please God, make him accept your forgiveness.'

So small a thing to ask.

Never before have we seen Charles acting in what seems so saintly a manner. Saintly but not a saint. You can hear "Lady Marchmain or even Charles' appalling commanding officer in "So small a think to ask"; it's like saying to God "I don't ask for much." This is the very bottom of the abyss.

The conversion comes in the next paragraph when Lord Marchmain's hand reaches for his forehead and Charles thinks that he is only doing it because he has felt the oil touch the skin and is about to wipe it away. And Charles prays, 'O God, don't let him do that.'

That is the moment. This is when Charles comes face to face with nihilism.

Nihilism
 I mentioned the Slate book club because they catch the nihilism. One, Meghan O'Rourke, says, correctly, there is a nihilism about the book. Another, Katie Roiphe, calls it "The darkest sentimental book in the world." And the third, Troy Patterson, says that none of the characters have done anything to earn their conversion.

That last comment is a favourite type for me. You see it again and again from non-believers—the conviction that the thing they don't want to believe in is something incredibly valuable that must be earned. They call Christians hypocrites for not being morally superior beings: "How can you, a Christian, be just as bad as me." "No, no," says Sebastian, "I am much wickeder."

Nihilism is a funny thing. It gets called up in the Slate discussion like it was something unusual. And yet, we live in an age where nihilism is commonplace. john Lennon's "Imagine" is about as straightforwardly nihilist as nihilism can get. So was Seinfeld. But that nihilism is a nihilism that refuses to take itself seriously. It wants to have a party in the dead end alleyway instead of going and beating its head to a pulp against the brick wall at the end of the alley. Just as Julia wants to have a few years peace.

It's here, just when we, and he, might think that he is headed for salvation, that Charles is dealt a harsh blow; it's at that "oh crap" moment when he thinks he is going to be denied the sign he so badlywants that Charles is converted. For only then does he become whole and admit to himself how desperately he craves this affirmation. Now he can understand precisely because he has so dreaded the awfulness of the nihilism he thought he might have had to face.

And notice that there is nothing in Lord Marchmain's act that guarantees anything at all. We've had all this explained to us in the long preceding discussion about "What is the priest for". In a sense, the answer is "Nothing", for God can do whatever he wants with or without a priest and any person can be genuinely penitent priest or no priest. (To be a good priest requires incredible humility; remember Charles saying when he meets his first priest "how unlike he was to a parson"?.) We don't know that Lord Marchmain really wants forgiveness so we don't know if he gets it. The sign could be bogus as so many religious signs turn out to be.

The only thing we know for certain is real in the scene is Charles' craving for God at just the moment when he thinks his nascent hope is nipped in the bud.

A little Proust to finish off
I've been dropping hints about the Proust influence on Waugh throughout. That is a bit contentious as there seems to be no evidence that Waugh had read Proust at this point. If we trust what Waugh says in his own letters, he had not.

But he clearly knows something about Proust as we saw in the Charlus remark that Mr. Samgrass makes.

I think it was Joshua Reynolds who told his students that they should know something about philosophy but went on to say that instead of reading philosophy, they could learn everything they really needed to know by having conversations about it with learned people. Waugh's knowledge of Proust may have come this way. Proust's great book was still coming out in various volumes and these were much discussed among the aesthetes at Oxford during Waugh's time there. And we know from letters and interviews that Waugh had a long-standing sense of inferiority at not being able to read Proust in French as his friends could.

But I think there is more and there is a telling hint in this chapter.

One of Waugh's favourite tricks was to use pastiches on other works in his writing. We've already seen one example in the travesty of Christ's passion in Anthony being dunked in Mercury. Edward McAleer writes about some examples from Waugh's first book, Decline and Fall, in Winter edition of The Evelyn Waugh Newsletter of 1973. Here are a couple of the examples he gives.
1. Here is a speech by Shylock Waugh will make an allusion to from The Merchant of Venice:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

And here is a Chokey speaking in Waugh's Decline and Fall:

"You folks all think the colored man hasn't got a soul. Any thing's good enough for the poor colored man. Beat him; put him in chains; load him with burdens … But all the time that poor colored man has a soul same as you have. Don't he breathe the same as you? don't he eat and drink? Don't he love Shakespeare and cathedrals and the paintings of the old masters same as you? Isn't he just asking for your love and help to raise him from the servitude into which your fore-fathers plunged him? Oh, say, white folks, why don't you stretch out a helping hand to the poor colored man, that's as good as you are, if you'll only let him be?"

2. Again, here is a paragraph from Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

 And here is Professor Silenus from Decline and Fall:

"What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of this biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!"

Again in that Slate discussion, Meghan O'Rourke says of Brideshead that it seems "Stitched together from passages from different genres". What she doesn't see is that pastiche is one of the glories of Waugh's writing. He is always stitching things in.

And one of the reasons that I think we can be pretty sure Waugh had read Proust is that he stitches in a bit of it into this chapter. In the first book of Swann's Way Marcel's Aunt Leonie owns the house in Comray and will leave it, along with considerable wealth, to Marcel and his family. As she is dying, Marcel describes her behaviour like this:

... so, this evening, she said to my grandfather, "Yes, some day when the weather is fine I shall go for a drive as far as the gate of the park." And in saying this she was quite sincere. She would have liked to see Swann and Tansonville again; but the mere wish to do so sufficed for all that remained of her strength, which its fulfillment would have more than exhausted. Sometimes a spell of fine weather made her a little more energetic, and she would get up and dress; but before she reached the outer room she would be tired again, and would insist on returning to bed. The process which had begun in her—and in her a little earlier only than it must come to all of us—as the great renunciation of old age as it prepares itself for death ....

And here is Lord Marchmain in today's chapter,

There were days days when Lord Marchmain was dressed, when he stood at the window or moved on his valet's arm from fire to fire through the rooms of the ground floor, when visitors came and went—neighbours and people from the estate, men of business from London—parcels of new books were opened and discussed, a piano was moved into the Chinese drawing-room; once at the end of February, on a single, unexpected day of brilliant sunshine, he called for a car and got as far as the hall, had on his fur coat, and reached the front door. Then suddenly he lost interest in the drive, said, "Not Now. Later. One day in the summer,' took his man's arm again and was led back to his chair.

The borrowing is pretty clear. But, as with all Waugh's borrowings, he re-purposes the text. Proust shows us how his Aunt Leonie has already begun to accept the great renunciation of this world. Waugh uses the same approach to show us Lord Marchmain's inability to do so. For later, when he is on oxygen, Lord Marchmain is still in that non-accepting mindset:

'When the summer comes,' said Lord Marchmain, oblivious of the deep corn and swelling fruit and the surfeited bees who slowly sought their hives in the heavy afternoon sunlight outside his windows, 'when the summer comes, I shall leave my bed and sit in the open air and breathe more easily.'

But summer never will come again for him. He will no more taste of the fruit of the vine until ....

The only thing that remains to point out is that this is not a famous passage of Proust. It is not something Waugh would have found out about by overhearing others discussing it. Only someone who knew his Proust quite well would know about this. I think Waugh read the first translated volumes of Proust and had read him closely. The influence is all over Brideshead Revisited. He uses Proust's techniques to a different end but he uses them.

 

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here when there is a next post.