"It had quite the reverse effect on me"

The Season of Brideshead
Et in Arcadia Ego, Chapter 4
Update: I was horrified to find this post was largely incoherent when I read it again. The electronic editor, for reasons beast known to itself, malfunctioned in ways that cut all sorts of bits out. What was left made little or no sense. One entire paragraph was cut leaving only two words orphaned. Anyway, I've fixed it as best I can below.

Do you remember that line? It comes from way back in Chapter one.

I'm not entirely confident even of who is supposed to be saying. I think it's Charles but ....

Here it is with a little context. Charles and Sebastian are driving back to Oxford.

'I'm sorry.' said Sebastian after a time. 'I'm afraid I wasn't very nice this afternoon. Brideshead often has that effect on me. But I had to take you to see nanny.

Why? I wondered; but said nothing—Sebastian's life was governed by a code of such imperatives. 'I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,' 'I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows,' I've absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!'—except, 'It had quite the reverse effect on me.'

The last line—'It had quite the reverse effect on me'—is not an imperative. It doesn't apply to anything Sebastian says above. I think it is Charles question, 'Why?', is meant to apply to both the imperatives and the effect Brideshead has on Sebastian. It's one of the profound differences between the two young men: Brideshead is a revelation to Charles and a curse to Sebastian.

(By the way, the second imperative, 'I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows', must make us wonder what context that can possibly have come up in doesn't it? I think it may also be a reference to John Donne's poem, "The Sun Rising". In it, Donne talks about being wakened to go hunting with the king when he'd rather stay in bed with his mistress. The love that Donne describes is almost solipsistic; it is a love that would make the whole rest of the world disappear not unlike what Sebastian is seeking, and the opposite of what Charles is seeking. It's also a magnificent poem, take the time to read it; I promise you your life will be richer for the experience. You can find it here.)

Here in Chapter four, Sebastian does get the something like that kind of love where the rest of the world leaves him alone and he can focus on his love. But what is the object of this love? As much as Charles would like to think it is him, it isn't. At this point Sebastian himself doesn't know. We'll see he keeps looking for this love in other contexts all the rest of the book.

Chapter four is the only one in Book one where we seem to get pure unbridled happiness right through. The sense of halcyon days here is so powerful that many readers, including me, have a tendency to forget the clouds that darken the whole of Book one and remember it instead as if it were all bliss and luxury. In fact, even the majority of this chapter is full of foreboding. In my edition, the chapter is twenty-four pages long. Waugh uses exactly four pages to describe the bliss at Brideshead as opposed to nearly ten pages to describe the enigma of Sebastian's faith. He is even more economical in the Venice section compressing all the wonderful experiences of Venice into a single paragraph and then devoting two pages to a single conversation between Cara and Charles where she says some rather foreboding things about how Sebastian hates his mother and, is overly fond of his childhood how he is destined to be an alcoholic.

First impressions
It's not an accident that we miss all this darkness for our guide on this tour, Charles Ryder, also misses it. He is so wrapped up in the memory of what was, for him, a time of discovery and growth, that he gushes about it. And, since he knows how the story ends, he lived it after all, he perhaps willfully overemphasizes the joys because he wants to underline that there were some after all.

One of the most powerful ways that Charles, unconsciously, and Waugh, consciously, tricks us into missing the darkness is in the opening paragraph:

The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor – the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead.

Prose doesn't get much purpler than that. Which raises the question: Why is it here? Those reading the older edition will encounter a lot of purple prose while those of us reading the revised edition will have been spared much of this but even if we'd been reading the unrevised edition, this particular paragraph is so far over the top that it has to stand out.

In the introduction to the Everyman Edition, Frank Kermode wonders why, given that Waugh revised the book precisely so he could cut the excesses, this section does not get cut. He also wonders about the long riff on the unfaithful wife in the prologue. He does not, but we might also wonder about why the exact details of the meals Charles has with Sebastian, his father and, later. Rex Mottram, are so important.

At the risk of being so impertinent to suggest that we might see something that Frank Kermode missed, I think that all these over the top bits were left in because they are Charles' going over the top and not Waugh doing so. That the purple paragraph above here is not Waugh's but Charles'. The problem with the purple prose for Waugh as he revised was not that there was any but that there was too much. If we read this purple prose as an indication of Charles Ryder's character we can read it in a different way.

Keeping that in mind, we can go back and look at that paragraph again and see that Waugh has let Charles unconsciously slip two details that undercut the wonder of it all. The first is the limbo metaphor. Limbo is the place where those who die before they can receive baptism go. It is a place where one is spared the horrors of hell but denied the glories of heaven. If we give that it's full weight, Charles believing himself "very near heaven" heaven in a different light for now it tells us there is a barrier between the heaven he can imagine and his getting there.

The second detail is the passing qualification here "I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven." Which tells us that Charles does not think Sebastian was very happy in those days.

Put it altogether and I think we have a chapter in which Charles tells us about his aesthetic education and how Brideshead transformed him. The very different effect it has on Sebastian is left aside for a moment. Charles is growing here and Sebastian is diminishing.

Just look at the pronouns in the paragraph immediately following the purple passage above where Sebastian talks about how the great house came to be built:

We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down, carted the stones up here, and built a new house. I'm glad they did, aren't you?

When Sebastian talks about events in the past, he uses "we". When he talks about his present response to the house, he switches to "they". It is only in the past—in an historical past that might as well be the mythical middle ages—that Sebastian feels a part of the household at Brideshead. It is no surprise then that he will say that the house "isn't mine" a line or two later. But it is very much Charles's house now. Not in the legal sense. He doesn't own it but what he does own is something more precious than real estate, even real estate as grand as Brideshead.

And what is that something? We might say the aesthetic education and maybe that is enough for some but it isn't enough for Waugh. Compare the two scenes that Charles sets out to paint in the office—the romantic landscape that Charles succeeds at and the "elaborate pastiche" that Sebastian wants him to do. We might think, well the second thing is too complicated. We might also think that an "elaborate pastiche", no matter how elaborate, is just the sort of thing someone who is not growing anymore would suggest.

The point being not that Sebastian himself cannot do much of anything—although he cannot, even the harmonium in his room is played by others not him—but that there is something underneath that aesthetic education that Charles does get. And I appreciate that that this will not resonate with non-Catholic and even less with non-Christian readers than it would for someone like me or, more importantly, for Evelyn Waugh, but that thing is God's grace.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.