Just an oddly decorated room

The Season of Brideshead
Brideshead Deserted, Chapter 3
An awful lot happens in this chapter and I will have to rein in my desire to try and comment on everything of significance.

The most important thing in the chapter, however, is to note who really has deserted Brideshead. Charles is in France, Sebastian is in Morocco, Bridey, Cordelia and Julia are all at Marchmain House. Lady Marchmain is in her grave at Brideshead. But, if we want to be very realist-minded about it, the only place that is really deserted in this chapter is Marchmain House because it is sold and torn down.

To figure out how Brideshead is really deserted, you have to think like a Catholic and we have the example of Cordelia here describing the de-consecration of the chapel at Brideshead:

After she was buried the priest came in—I was there alone. I don't think he saw me—and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoop and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary, and left the tabernacle open, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room.

The really odd thing is the thing she doesn't say. Because there is one more thing the priest would have done that Cordelia would have also seen but she omits from her recounting.

But let's start from the beginning and build up to that. An altar stone is a specially consecrated stone that was at the time of the story the only place a consecration of the host could take place. It's a very old belief—preceding Catholicism by hundreds of years—that a stone would be a place for a sacred presence. Those who know their Bible may remember that Jacob dreams of his struggles with God while resting his head on a stone and, in the morning, uses that stone to build an altar. Ancient religions all over the place, Japan for example, have long associated special stones with a sacred presence.

This is an important thing to consider when thinking about Catholicism. "Catholic" means universal and the church claims to be the church for everyone—dead, living or not yet born, Catholic or non-Catholic—the Catholic church claims to exist for you.

The oil is used for anointing especially anointing the sick. Holy water is used in blessings. Most important of all: the sanctuary lamp is lit to signify that the real presence of Jesus is in the consecrated hosts.

And that is what Cordelia doesn't mention. There would have been consecrated hosts present in the tabernacle which the priest would have consumed during this ritual. Why doesn't she mention those? Well, it could be that she or Waugh just forgot but I don't think so. I think Cordelia is more aware of the connection with something eternal.

Again let me say that I appreciate that non-Catholics don't believe this and perhaps really don't want to believe it. But, for the sake of understanding the book, it is important to remember that this is a book about Catholics and readers need to understand how Catholics think to get this just as you would need to know something about Buddhists to read a novel about them or Jews to read a novel about them or about secular humanists to read a novel about them, you really need to grasp this point to fully understand Brideshead Revisited.

What concerns Cordelia is not a particular object that is leaving the room but with the connection to what she (and I) consider an eternal sacrifice. For we Catholics believe that the sacrifice that Jesus makes on the cross takes place both inside and outside history. It is an historical event but there is also a sense in which it is always happening. For an individual Catholic to make any sacrifice at all is, therefore, not delayed gratification but a way of connecting to this one perfect sacrifice. We believe that sacrific is its own reward.

Anyway, every time the sacrifice of the mass is performed, it is, for us Catholics, the supreme connection with the eternal and the sacred. That is what Cordelia is talking about. It isn't any particular thing that is gone, it is the ability to make this connection here in this room that is gone. This is the reverse of the discussion about the tortoise and the pyx. The room is just an oddly decorated room once that function is gone.

And that is why she stays there until he is gone and only then is it a just an oddly decorated room. For when God's priest walks out the door this room can no longer perform the function it was built for.

A few odds and ends
The above is what really matters but there are quite a few other things happening and some of them are interesting.

Parallel lives
For example, this parallel between something Boy Mulcaster says here and what Sebastian said back in Venice.

Boy Mulcaster: 'You and I,' he said, 'were too young to have fought in the war. Other chaps fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We'll show them. We'll show the dead chaps we can fight too."

Sebastian: I remember Sebastian looking up at the Colleoni statue and saying: 'It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war.'

Colleoni was a soldier of fortune and the famous statue shows him on horseback. Boy and Sebastian have more in common than we might like to admit. And the name "Boy" does suggest an pre-occupation with youth doesn't it?

Everybody in this novel is a lot like the person we might imagine to be their opposite.

Wish fulfillment
Charles regrets leaving Paris to come help with the national strike.

I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there—for I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a garçonnière in Auteuil—and wished I had not come.

"Emancipated" is a great word isn't it. What can he mean by that? As recently as the 1980s, people used to say that a woman was "liberated" without irony. Nowadays, it's hard to think what is left for a girl to be liberated or emancipated from.

But–being the gross disgusting pig of a boy that the Serpentine One occasionally accuses me of being—I must point out that "garçonnière" (gar-sun-ee-air is a rough approximation of the pronunciation) means bachelor apartment so whatever "concerned with" means it all happens with the three of them in the same room together.

Which leads me to revisit the issue of "wish fulfillment". When Charles goes to Paris we might say there is evidence of wish fulfillment. All his life Waugh regretted that he had not learned to speak or read French well. We might say that surely here Waugh is writing the life he wished he might have lived. And that is true. I think that is exactly what Charles does—he lives the life Waugh might have wanted. BUT we should remember to notice what the consequences of this are. Charles is indeed, somewhat like a Waugh who does exactly what he wants but where does he end up. If anything, the novel is the opposite of wish fulfillment.

Hating God by hating people
There is the memory of the late Theresa Brideshead as recounted by Cordelia:

'Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's all bosh.'

There is, if we're paying attention, about as harsh a condemnation as sweet little Cordelia is capable of in that: "she was saintly but she wasn't a saint". You may think you're being hard on Lady Marchmain but anything you may think is small cheese compared to that. (By the way, notice how  Bridey realizes that Sebastian deserves an allowance, an issue I mentioned earlier. Lady Marchmain would never have allowed such a thing because it was the source of her power to manipulate poor Sebastian.)

But it's the highlighted bit that I think we need to remember. Find something in someone else that is like ourselves and hate that. Keeping in mind what I say about the similarities between Boy and Sebastian above we might keep that in mind.

Simple boobies who love God by loving people
Alternatively, we might find something in someone else that we can love and thereby find reason to see that God loves us. In response to Cordelia's attempt to explain why people hated Lady Marchmain above, Charles says,

'I have heard almost the same thing once before—from someone very different.'

Cordelia doesn't pick up on the hint and ask, "Who was that?" but we should. It was Cara describing how Lord Marchmain feels about Lady Marchmain:

And all for Lady Marchmain. He will not touch a hand that has touched hers. ... He is mad.  And how has she deserved this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up. I have never met Lady Marchmain; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved. I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.

Cara's name is "Cara" after all.

And I'll wrap up with one other good and simple person from this chapter. The monk who takes care of Sebastian at the infirmary:

And he is so kind. There is a poor German boy with a foot that will not heal and secondary syphilis, who comes here for treatment. Lord Flyte found him in Tangier and took him in and gave him a home. A real Samaritan.'

'Poor simple monk,' I thought, 'poor booby.' God forgive me.

Yes, I'm on about the sex and love again because that is what Charles pities the monk for not seeing: the real nature of the relationship between Sebastian and Kurt. But loving the right way, which is Waugh's concern, over and over again, is not primarily about the things we are not supposed to be doing—the stuff high in the catalogue of grave sins—but with the way we are supposed to love; he is concerned with trying to find something in someone else that we can love and thereby find reason to see that God loves us.

The poor booby of a monk passes the test and so does Sebastian the Epicurean.

In no other novel does Waugh lay out his understanding of faith, hope and love quite so fully. Every other thing he wrote has him hiding behind what is dark and what is absurd. Nowhere else do we get to see Waugh quite as naked as we do in Brideshead Revisited.


There will be  quick entry on music later today

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.