What's the tortoise for?

The Season of Brideshead
Brideshead Deserted, Chapter 1
Brideshead has an amazing power to make critics stupid. The very first critic I ever read about it said the book was a failure because Waugh failed to see how much Charles and Rex have in common. That's like saying that Moby Dick is a failure because Herman Melville failed to recognize the importance of the whale. This moronic critic couldn't see that the similarities between Charles and Rex are something that Waugh very artfully built into the novel.

I think there are two reasons critics get stupid this way.

The first is because Waugh rebels against everything they value. The very project of writing an English Novel about Catholicism is an affront. Whether believer or atheist, if there is one thing every English intellectual knows it is that shaking off the superstition and authoritarianism of the Catholic church is what made Britain great. Because it is very much a classic English novel in its language, its techniques and its setting, Waugh effectively takes the some of the favourite vocabulary and literary devices of the English intellectual and uses them to support views the opposite of what they would have.

It's not that its transgressive. It's that it is transgressive in the wrong way. For most of us, great satire is something that mocks people we already think are stupid. A novel set in a big English house that ended up exposing the hypocrisy of the Flytes and in which the only genuine character was a young boy who worked for the family as a servant and was ignored by all while he was the only true artist in the crowd, that is a book intellectuals would love.

The other reason, as I've already said, is that they imagine they are reading a book about a social climbing snob written by a social climbing snob. Here is a critic named L.E. Sissman ranking Waugh's novels:

I would rank Decline and Fall and Pinfold, for their very different but equally genuine qualities as art, with A Handful of Dust, placing Vile Bodies (1930) and The Loved OneThe Sword of Honor books would seem to come next, followed by Scoop (1938), and such dilute and repetitious work as Black Mischief (1932) and the embarrassingly wish-fulfilling (though often beautifully written) Brideshead Revisited (1945) at the bottom of the list.  

A quick note, notice that Sissman has to acknowledge that Brideshead is beautifully written, in parts at least. It's not Waugh's art that bothers critics: it's where he goes with it.

Now stop and think about the book itself for a moment. What is wish-fulfilling about Brideshead? Is there a single character anywhere in the book who gets what he wants? Rex maybe does in that his political career goes well but Rex can hardly be said to represent Waugh's dreams. Everyone else loses what they hoped for. The novel is very much a novel of loss and what is lost is wishes denied.

Here's an odd question: When in the novel is Brideshead revisited? At first it seems obvious: It is revisited when Charles goes there with the army in the prologue. But it is revisited over and over again. Sebastian is going back when he takes Charles the first time. Charles gets to go back for a Christmas visit and then an Easter visit and then another Christmas visit (hmmm? and the last visit is in spring and ... sorry I got distracted there for a moment.)  Later he will get to go back with Julia. And then, finally, we get to go back with him in the epilogue. But, except for the halcyon days visit in chapter four when he is alone and in love with Sebastian, every one of these visits is a disappointment. People keep going to Brideshead with great hopes only to have those hopes dashed. Everything Charles tries to build at Brideshead comes to ruin.

Literary and culture references
Brideshead is littered with these.  You can, and I have, play a sort of parlour game where you meet with other fans of the book and see who can spot the most references. Eliot Girl noted one in the comments a while ago:

Jules, can we talk about The Waste Land for a moment? The bells striking nine.

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Eliot knew exactly what he was doing when he mentioned St. Mary Woolnoth in his poem, at this moment in his poem. He also knew exactly what he was doing when he sounded the 9 bells. The point of this passage is that the church is there, but the crowd flows past without noticing it. St. Mary Woolnoth in London was also, in 1922, the site of the Bank St. Tube Station, so the church itself is literally transformed into a commuter's passage-way, just as the bell sounds not the angelus but simply the tolling hours of another work day. But the church is there. With all of its magnificent history and symbolic potential, which Eliot knew, the church is there. Eliot offers it in the poem as a potential alternative to modern fragmentation, loss, grief and pain that is missed by the crowd. Later perhaps this potential is realized to some extent with St. Magnus Martyr church in "The Fire Sermon".

So the bells ring nine here in Brideshead. Did Waugh know The Waste Land? We know he did. Could he have chosen some other Oxford church bells to ring out in this chapter? He lists, in chapter two, all the different church bells that do ring out. He chooses St. Mary, and he chooses the number nine. And the moment is followed, as you say, by a betrayal.

Of course "chiming" is a much nicer sound than the "dead sound on the final stroke of nine" - but it is all a matter of perception, isn't it? When Sebastian comes, the bells chime. Of course they do - he's beautiful and we love him. But the echoes from this moment in The Waste Land are, I think, still there.

The bells striking nine! Yes, the echoes are there and I'm sure they're deliberate. What Eliot Girl doesn't mention, probably because it is so obvious for her that it doesn't require mentioning, is that nine bells or nine tollers, is rung for a dead man. Dorothy L Sayers fans will remember that one of her books, a book just just full of bell lore, is called The Nine Tailors which is to make us think of the nine tollers.

The bell is chiming for Sebastian all through this book. He is marked for death. He is a child who was born to die; not unlike the child whose birth we will celebrate a week this Saturday. The bell tolls again this chapter. Cordelia has just come back from the hunt and her mother asks her where Sebastian is:

'He's in disgrace.' The words, in that clear, child's voice had the ring of a bell tolling, but she went on ...

And the aftermath of this is very much poor Sebastian's doom. Everyone gives up on him. His mother gives up on him. He's already given up on himself. Even Charles loses hope and leaves Brideshead, he thinks for ever.

Brideshead is haunted by literary references. Four works in particular haunt it. The Waste Land is one of these. Brideshead begins in early spring with bitter memories, it documents a bunch of fruitless quests in a world haunted by the First World War and then it ends in a chapel. But if a waste land haunts this book it is a peculiar waste land that keeps trying to be Tintern Abbey. Because that is the second ghost. People from Sebastian at the first visit to Charles at the end keep hoping to find treasures they buried in the past. It is also haunted by Proust because, like in Proust, life in the book keeps trying to live up to art and failing. Finally, and this is all to come, it is haunted by King Lear but the only hint of that we have so far is a daughter named Cordelia,

The significance of the pickle
Which brings me back to the tortoise. Of all the cultural allusions in Brideshead, the tortoise is weirdest. On the surface the significance of the tortoise seems obvious. It's the third reference to buried treasure.

In book one, chapter one, Sebastian imagines burying treasure:

'Just the place to bury a crock of gold,' said Sebastian. 'I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.'

In the current chapter, Charles imagines his predicament in terms of a buried treasure that he cannot retrieve:

I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

Just down the page from that we learn that the tortoise with the embedded jewels that Rex bought Julia—trying to buy his way into what "nether land" with that?—has been buried. We learn this when Cordelia writes to Charles:

'Julia's tortoise disappeared. We think it buried itself, as they do, so there goes the packet (expression of Mr. Mottram's).'

And so we have what is a familiar pattern in Waugh, the happy dream turns into a sad reality and then a travesty. And therefore, we might say, the choice of the tortoise is obvious: the whole point is to be grotesque and Waugh just imagined a Jewel-encrusted tortoise because it is grotesque.

Except that Waugh rarely imagines anything. He's always borrowing from other literary sources and rewriting scenes and events to his own ends (just like Proust, albeit to a very different end from Proust's). And that is what he has done her. That tortoise has a literary heritage. Here it is:

This tortoise was a fancy which had seized Des Esseintes some time before his departure from Paris. Examining an Oriental rug, one day, in reflected light, and following the silver gleams which fell on its web of plum violet and alladin yellow, it suddenly occurred to him how much it would be improved if he could place on it some object whose deep color might enhance the vividness of its tints.

Possessed by this idea, he had been strolling aimlessly along the streets, when suddenly he found himself gazing at the very object of his wishes. There, in a shop window on the Palais Royal, lay a huge tortoise in a large basin. He had purchased it. Then he had sat a long time, with eyes half-shut, studying the effect.

Decidedly, the Ethiopic black, the harsh Sienna tone of this shell dulled the rug's reflections without adding to it. The dominant silver gleams in it barely sparkled, crawling with lack-lustre tones of dead zinc against the edges of the hard, tarnished shell.

He bit his nails while he studied a method of removing these discords and reconciling the determined opposition of the tones. He finally discovered that his first inspiration, which was to animate the fire of the weave by setting it off against some dark object, was erroneous. In fact, this rug was too new, too petulant and gaudy. The colors were not sufficiently subdued. He must reverse the process, dull the tones, and extinguish them by the contrast of a striking object, which would eclipse all else and cast a golden light on the pale silver. Thus stated, the problem was easier to solve. He therefore decided to glaze the shell of the tortoise with gold.

The tortoise, just returned by the lapidary, shone brilliantly, softening the tones of the rug and casting on it a gorgeous reflection which resembled the irradiations from the scales of a barbaric Visigoth shield.

At first Des Esseintes was enchanted with this effect. Then he reflected that this gigantic jewel was only in outline, that it would not really be complete until it had been incrusted with rare stones.

That's from Chapter 5  of Au Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans was one of the French decadents who had a huge influence on the English aesthetes. Waugh and his friends would have often discussed this odd book while at Oxford.

What does it mean that Waugh puts Huysmans's tortoise into Brideshead? It's especially odd that he has Rex bring the tortoise. It's the sort of thing you can picture Sebastian doing—if ever there was an elaborate pastiche, that tortoise is it—but not Rex.

I think about it every time I read Brideshead and I wonder. The relevant chapter from Au Rebours is at this link. It's even translated for us. Maybe you can figure it out. Really, go ahead and read it. It's short and will take less than ten minutes of your time.

Oh yeah, when you hit the last paragraph and Huysmans compares the dead tortoise to a "pyx", it may help you to know that a pyx is a container that Catholics use to carry consecrated hosts—which is to say to bring what we believe to be the real presence of Christ himself— to the sick. A pyx will often be decorated up to look quite elaborate but the real valuable is not, for a Catholic anyway, the shiny gold and jewels but the rather humble looking cracker inside.

Here is a pyx for those who have never seen one. It has a pewter relief of the supper at Emmaus on it showing the moment when the two disciples recognize Jesus at the blessing and breaking of the bread (Luke 24: 13-35).

That is a hinge on the bottom because it opens to store the host inside. You can see how someone might think of the tortoise analogy. In the history of the Catholic church there has been a tendency to build layers upon layers of fabulous decoration on top of the thing that really matters. Think of illuminated Bibles, think of Tabernacle doors, think of the fabulous mythologies built up around a  saint like Ursula, think of the great cathedrals.

And yet, if a thief were to accost me on the street and demand I hand over this little container, for that is my pyx in the picture, my highest goal should be to honour the wafer inside. Once I have secured it, I should hand the thing that actually cost me money easily because, comparatively speaking, it should be practically worthless to me.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.