The season of Brideshead: Hortus conclusus

Et in Arcadia ego, Chapter one
Hortus conclusus

[Update: After looking at the comment below, I reread this post and it seems to me that I am being far too glib here. The nature of the relationship to Charles and Sebastian and the eros to love of God connection is obvious to me now because I have read this book many times and on these repeated readings the picture has gotten clearer. When I first read it I suspected something was happening but the very clear image I am assuming here took years to come into its present focus.]

A garden locked is my sister, my bride, 

a spring locked, a fountain sealed.

That, obviously, is from the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, Chapter 4, Verse 12. It's application to Brideshead is obvious. Waugh had it in mind when he created the place and the imaginary landscape that goes with it and the name for the house refers back to this verse. And this garden and fountain imagery carries right through to the ending with a fountain that has quite literally been sealed up.

Right in this first chapter Waugh uses the garden metaphor to describe the love Charles Ryder seeks at Oxford:

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

And he finds this garden ... well, where?

And here we have what I know is a touchy issue for some but let's come right out and say it: Charles and Sebastian have a sexual relationship. There is no room for dispute here although some try to keep it up.

Why would anyone resist this inescapable aspect of the story? Well, for starters, because a lot of this book's biggest fans are Catholic and some Catholics don't like the idea of a love that begins in a same sex relationship ending with a love for God. But that is exactly what Waugh does here. Others, I suspect, are put off by the images this conjures up; they don't want to think about the mechanics of it, what the Serpentine One calls the insert part A into slot B stuff.
I have good news for the second group, Waugh doesn't want to rub your face in any of that detail. He never once refers to any same sex act. As to my fellow Catholics who may be offended, well I have bad news for you. Brideshead is an unapologetic account of how eros, same sex eros, between two aesthetes ends up serving God's purposes. Waugh doesn't deny that it is a sin but this love, and it is real love, leads to God.

Pin cushions and misogyny
We get all sorts of hints in the first chapter. The first hint of which is the running misogyny in Charles and Sebastian's banter. When the women can be excluded there is calm and bliss. When they are present, they are a threat and are treated like a threat.

Note how exclusively male the world these two live in and how much both of them like it that way. Here is how Charles describes the arrival of women:

Echoes of intruders penetrated every corner, and in my own college was no echo, but an original fount of grossest disturbance. We were giving a ball. The front quad, where I lives, was floored and tented; palms and azaleas were banked around the porter's lodge and worst of all, the don who lived above me ... had lent his rooms for a Ladies Cloakroom, and a printed notice proclaiming this outrage hung not six inches from my oak.

Charles is not keen on women entering his world even for one week. That's an odd attitude for a young man to have. Sebastian's response is even more telling, with added notes of misogyny all his own:

I must say the whole of Oxford has become most peculiar suddenly. Last night it was pullulating with women. You're to come at once, out of danger.

To pullulate means to breed or spread so as to become extremely common and, in this case, become a danger like a disease. Later, after they have escaped, Sebastian will say,

The women are still doing whatever women do to themselves before coming downstairs. Sloth has undone them.

Sebastian talks about women's intimate secrets not with wonder but with disgust.

The second hint are the repeated links of Sebastian to the pin cushion meant to recall the image of Saint Sebastian (about which I will say more in a post later today.)

Not via media

Sebastian's introduction in the book highlights his beauty. His eccentric behaviour, "which seemed to know no bounds" is not described but we are told that Freud has terms for it. Right from the outset, we learn that they share one another's clothing with the revelation that Sebastian is wearing Charles' tie, and we might wonder how he managed to take it off and leave it in Sebastian's rooms for Sebastian to pick it up and put it on in the first pace. When Charles and Sebastian pull off the road and sit in the shade, Charles gazes at Sebastian's profile; if your a guy, try that on your best buddy when the two of you are lying side by side on the grass and see if he feels comfortable.

And throughout, there is this ongoing suggestion of not holding back but letting go, going all the way. Charles describes his first group of friends, before he met Sebastian, as intellectuals "who maintained a middle course of culture between the flamboyant ‘aesthetes’ and the proletarian scholars who scrambled fiercely for facts." (I believe that Waugh, by the way, intends us to read this as a mocking pastiche on Anglicanism's via media between Roman Catholicism and Calvinism and to draw the relevant parallel between being an aesthete and being Catholic.) When Charles goes to see Sebastian the first time, he hears Collins nagging voice urging caution but he ignores it.

And this is just the beginning, there are many, many more references to erotic love between men in the first portions of this book. So many I won't even bother to mention them all.

Okay, you may say, but why are you doing this to me Jules? If Waugh is content to not rub this in our faces, why are you insisting?

I'm doing it because you aren't really reading the book if you don't see this. Everything about the relationship between Charles and Sebastian has the characteristics of romance not friendship. Charles is driven by the jealousy and insecurity of a lover as he pursues Sebastian and it is only if we think of the relationship in those terms that we can make any sense of it.

If it's any relief, I won't be insisting that you imagine any part A into slot B stuff, but you do have to see the decadence and eros and how this adds up to love with a capital "L" to get this book.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post is here.