Thwarted!

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, chapter four
It took me yesterday's post just to get back in the rhythm I think. Also chapter three has a lot of stuff in it, much of which I had to leave without comment.

There are, for example, odd little symmetric details about that chapter. There is a section about Bridey's private life that talks about his membership in "the Knights of Malta", a group of eminent men who "meet once a month for an evening of ceremonious buffoonery." And in the relevant paragraph, we get this odd little detail:

...each had his sobriquet—Bridey was called Brother Grandee—and a specially designed jewel worn like an order of chivalry, symbolizing it ...

Did you catch the echo? Don't feel bad if you did not. I've read this book over and over and it was only this time that I spotted it. It takes us back to, what a surprise, chapter three of the first book, "Et in Arcadia Ego", when Edward Ryder is making his son's life difficult through ceremonious buffoonery in the form of an awful dinner party and he shows up:

I saw my father snuffling from behind a case of ceramics as stood with them. That evening he wore, like a chivalric badge of battle, a small red rose in his button hole.

Parallel lives
This sort of repetition is constant.

'It's frightening,' Julia once said, 'to think of how completely you have forgotten Sebastian.

'He was the forerunner.'

'That's what you said in the storm. I've thought since, perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.'

Later on the same page, she says something even more telling. Charles has tried to explain that he is not forgetting Sebastian but experiencing him in Julia and her he had been experiencing in Sebastian all those years before:

'That's cold comfort for a girl,' she said when I tried to explain. 'How do I know I shan't suddenly turn out to be somebody else?'

And I take you back to the very beginning where Waugh replaces the usual boilerplate disclaimer about any resemblance to persons or events et cetera with this:

I am not I : thou art not he or she : they are not they

That now reads more like an epigraph than a disclaimer. It's shame really that Waugh did not live long enough to mock Facebook and texting. As shallow and vapid as the Bright Young Things might have appeared at the time, they show substance and depth compared to the Facebook generation. But mock as he might, Waugh would not have been disappointed by the Facebook generation. He would have been gleeful to see people turn out to be just what he expected they would.

You are not the person you think you are. You are not interesting. Your text messages are boring. Your Twitter tweets are facile and vapid. Your Facebook profile only magnifies the foolishness you pathetically dare to call your life. Your daily blogging about Brideshead only serves to show how empty your existence is.

If, like me, you have the incredible fortune to be married to a wonderful woman, you might think yourself unique. But, precisely because she is wonderful, she would most likely have been married happily if I had not come along. She has the gift of love and everything magic she has brought to me might have gone to someone else if I had blown it all; and I am so good at blowing it when it really matters.

Not at all by the way, I hope it is clear now that we should not trust Charles telling this tale. When he says his theme is memory, we should wonder just how reliable those memories are because they are based on judgments that are dubious. When, at the very beginning of this chapter, he refers to Celia's new lover  Robin as "[a] half-baked, pimply youth" we should see the older Charles realizing just how easily each generation of youth is replaced by another. Every husband can be replaced; every youth bounding over the hills like a stag will, in five years time, be replaced by others.

Cordelia
Which brings me to Cordelia's reappearance. There are two miraculous bits of casting in the 1981 TV series. The first is Nickolas Grace as Anthony Blanche and the second is Phoebe Nicholls as Cordelia. For all the talk about Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, it is those two who make the series work. And it is their willingness to appear faintly ridiculous that works. Not because these two characters in particular are supposed to be faintly ridiculous but because every character in every Waugh novel is faintly ridiculous.

Nicholls delivers the following lines perfectly in the series:

'You and Julia ...' she said. And then, as we moved towards the house, 'When you met me last night did you think, "Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works"? Did you think "thwarted"?

There is something perfect about how Nicholls opens and closes that paragraph. When she says, "You and Julia," there is a smile in her voice but it doesn't quite come off. We hear a bit of the little girl who saw her brother's friend and imagined a little what it would be like to marry him. And again only bettter, there is the way she comes down on "thwarted". She puts all the weight on that word—exactly the word someone who really didn't worry about it would not emphasize—so we think, she is trying to convince herself it isn't true as well as Charles.

Here on the page she might convince us a little too easily. We might miss the hint, just a little earlier in the dialogue, when she is surprised and a little miffed to find out that Charles already knows that her governess had committed suicide when Cordelia was a little girl. Cordelia, not being Bridey, would know full well that this is exactly the sort of gossip that gets passed on about one but she hoped not in her case. She wanted to believe that she was different.

Her lingering childhood crush is not, I think, unrequited. We have Charles, as well, desperately wanting to believe for he too had a crush on her. It was barely there and it would have been so wrong—like wanting to fondle the Blessed Virgin Mary—so he suppressed it. But it was there.

So, when Charles says the following of Sebastian turning out as he has, we should think of more than Sebastian:

I thought of the youth with the teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts. 'It's not what one would have foretold,' I said. 'I suppose he doesn't suffer.'

We should think of Cordelia here too. And Julia. And Charles. And even Bridey. They're all thwarted. They're all suffering, albeit not suffering so intensely as the holy one, Sebastian.

Two Springs
In response to Charles' remark about Sebastian and suffering that I quoted above, Cordelia says,

'Oh yes, I think he does [suffer]. One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is—no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It's taken that form with him ... I've seen so much suffering in the last few years; there's so much coming for everybody soon. It's the spring of love ...'

It's the spring of love. You might almost miss that reading along.

In the last paragraph of the chapter, Charles gives us another, extended metaphor of spring in a trapper during the last storm of winter "everything dry and ship-shape and warm inside" only for the sun to come out high on the slopes afterward and melt enough to cause the avalanche to carry away this little cozy repsite.

Yes, the spring of love in so many senses. The spring that launches love. The spring that is fed with melting water from the high alpine snows. The spring that is the wonderful season of almost pagan rebirth. No one with any poetry in their soul could associate winter with warmth and spring with suffering could they?

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

"Mixing memory with desire"? Does that remind you of anyone? Of someone who says his theme is memory but is, unbeknownst to himself, telling us just as much of thwarted desire as his memories?

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.