Hot pants

The Season of Brideshead
How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love
Here is another painting of Saint Sebastian. This one is by Antonello da Messina but, and this is the part that may apply to Brideshead, it was formerly believed to be by Bellini.

Years ago I saw this painting with my then girlfriend Katrijn. I, intending to be censorious, made a  quip about how tight the saint's pants are. Katrijn surprised me by saying, "I love it, you can see everything." I was shocked because I was still relatively innocent at that point and didn't think that women, especially women I was dating at the time, would respond quite so openly to something like this.

Update: The image below is a detail of a larger painting and shows not Christ as I had previously indicated but one of the two thieves crucified with him. Thanks to Roberto Maján for the correction.

She had a point, however. It isn't so obvious in the above image, courtesy of Wikipedia, but in the painting itself you can make out the exact shape and dimension of what is underneath those pants. You can as Katrijn bluntly put it, see everything. Messina, by the way, puts Christ one of the thieves crucified with Christ in exactly the same tight pants! That painting, mercifully, is not a front view.

In any case, I take it I don't have to connect the dots to make the homoerotic elements here clear.

Phaedrus
The aesthetes were not all gay by any stretch of the imagination but the culture they favoured was welcoming to homosexuals. All his life Waugh was accepting of homosexuality. There is an exchange of letters between he and Nancy Mitford where they both wonder why American critics and writers kept insisting that homosexual man be depressed when those that Mitford and Waugh knew were so cheerful and pleasant.

Waugh was also deeply aware of the homosexual subculture of his time. The homosexual aesthetes were much concerned with Greek culture because of that culture's positive portrayal of the sexual education of boys by older men. A frequent allusion was Plato's Phaedrus.

This book, which I have mentioned before in this thread, is one of my favourite books and I have read it at least once every two years since I first read it the year I was eighteen. It's an amazingly current book. In the opening, Phaedrus greets Socrates with the news that he has heard a speech by Lysias in which Lysias argues it is better to "yield to a non-lover". In other words, the question is about whether sex without love is a good idea.

Socrates answer is no, sex without love is not a good thing. However, and here we can see how Waugh might read it, Socrates treats even sex with love as a temporary thing so it isn't quite the distinction your typical Catholic writer might make. And the issue here is purely with erotic love, which is a different thing from lust.

What is especially interesting for my purposes here is where Phaedrus and Socrates have their conversation. Plato is very clear that Socrates, who is out in the country, is not in his usual surroundings. Socrates allows Phaedrus to lead him out to a shady spot under a plane tree:

Phaedrus: Do you see that tallest plane–tree in the distance?
Socrates: Yes.
Phaedrus: There are shade and gentle breezes, and grass on which we may either sit or lie down.

The magic of the place where they have their discussion is an important aspect of the book.

By Herè, a fair resting–place, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane–tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane–tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze:—so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.

And now to my very favourite line in all of Brideshead. Charles and Cara are sitting in a magical place. They are on the terrace out of the sun, sitting on comfortable couches, overlooking the Grand Canal. Cara has been Charles' guide.

She stirred on her sofa, shifting her weight so as she could look down on the passing boats, and said in fond, mocking tones: 'How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love,' and then added with a sudden swoop to earth, Sebastian drinks too much.

Cara is one of only a very few mature adults in Brideshead—all the other characters refuse to grow up in various ways—and I will forever love her for saying, "How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love." Because, well, because it is good good to sit in the shade and talk of love.

Is it an intended echo of the Phaedrus? I think so, especially given the subject matter of their conversation.

'I think you are very fond of Sebastian,' she said.

'Why, certainly.'

'I know of these romantic friendhsips of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.'

She was so composed and matter-of-fact that I could not take her amiss, but I failed to find an answer. 

As I've mentioned before, there are people who go to great lengths to take her amiss; to fabulous lengths to convince themselves and others that there is nothing more than a close friendship between Charles and Sebastian. There is no room to take Waugh amiss here any more than Charles can take Cara amiss. And this is clear in the next few lines:

'It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl. Alex you see had it for a girl, for his wife.'

She doesn't mean pre-pubescent children here, she means adolescent children. Throughout the rest of the book you cannot help but notice the constant reference to Charles' young manhood as a sort of extended adolescence. Most, importantly, we get it in Charles' thinking about how he would answer Jasper.

In the event, that Easter vacation formed a short stretch of level road in the precipitous descent of which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

It's not just that these hints keep coming up, it's that they always connect to love. You could, I suppose, try and convince yourself that drunkenness is high in the catalogue of high sins but what you cannot ignore is the way he comes back to love and this extended adolescence over and over again.  And it is important that they connect with love for love is what will redeem Charles.

And, if it's being same-sex love isn't jolting enough, the other thing about it is that it is temporary. It is a phase for Charles to go through on his way to a more mature love. And that love turns out to be for ... well, it's complicated.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.