Where are you going with all this sex stuff?

A Brideshead quick hit
A reader who knows me asked that question today.

And if it occurred to her, it must have occurred to others so I thought I'd answer it.

Short answer; nowhere. I'm not building up some daring conclusion that this is really a book about sex or that Waugh was a closet case or any such thing. (One of my sisters has argued for the latter for about thirty years now—she claims that all Waugh's women are just boys and men with women's names—but she is wrong.)

The thing is, I think it is really important to read the book Waugh actually wrote. An awful lot of Brideshead's biggest fans and harshest critics insist on projecting a fantasy onto the pages they see instead of reading them. The distortion is rather staggering.

Not as bad as poor Pride and Prejudice. But it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that many readers don't actually read either novel. They read every word on every page and they keep turning the pages until they get the end but they spend all their time looking for confirming evidence of an illusion instead of really reading the books.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.