Back to Brideshead

My morning started off great with two great comments on one of my Brideshead posts. I love it when someone reads my stuff and posts intelligent remarks in response. But when I went to the post to thank him or her for their remarks, I found that they had deleted them. Sigh.

Fortunately, nothing on the internet is really gone. Here is the second comment (this is about Julia's dramatic speech at the fountain):

Oh, and, also, the Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, nursery sense of Faith and religion, is quite Chestertonian, wouldn't you agree? And, hence, legitimated within the present novel. 

That's a very astute observation. But where does it lead us?

That Chestertonian view is associated primarily with Lady Marchmain. The bitter outpouring we see from Julia at the fountain is Lady Marchmain coming back to haunt her as she also haunts Sebastian, only Cordelia seems to grow above her mother. To ask the question bluntly: Does Waugh admire Chesterton's viewpoint? He is certainly willing to allow it a place but I'm not sure he admires it. And, never mind Waugh, should we admire it?

This is particularly relevant today because Chesterton's view was thoroughly Franciscan. That is not unusual in an Englishman. Centuries of anti-Dominican propaganda combined with the bright romanticism of Wordsworth primed Englishmen of that era to be receptive to Saint Francis. If you have 50 minutes to spare, you will find many themes in this video that overlap with Brideshead Revisisted:

But what did Waugh think of all this? He is willing to see just about everything as faintly ridiculous including some of the most revered and influential forms of Catholic spirituality. We are meant to laugh at Bridey's Jesuitical attitudes but we are not meant to think that Bridey gets Jesuitical spirituality wrong. It is even more problematic in the case of Lady Marchmain for she is more sinister than just faintly ridiculous and, again, I don't think this is because we are supposed to think she gets Franciscan spirituality wrong.

Stick around 'til the end of the above video and you will get Clark's account of Giotto. There, I think, you get a view that is closer to Charles Ryder's spirituality. But we shouldn't assume that Charles veiw is necessarily that of Waugh himself.

I don't have an answer to my own questions. Not yet anyway. Like Benedict XVI, I've always inclined to a more Augustinian view and I am resistant to Franciscan spirituality but I can't say I've reached any final conclusions.

This summer I am going to reread and edit all my Brideshead posts and put them together on one page to make them easier to find and read.

Mousing around

Well-fed cats are better mousers than starving cats. If getting mice out of somewhere, say a barn, really matters to you, you'll feed your barn cats well. It's one of those odd things that, like the nails that Thoreau used to build the cabin at Walden Pond,  doesn't necessarily strike you as important. If you think about it a bit, though, an unsettling thought will hit you. Not necessarily morally unsettling, although it will be for some, but something that will shake up some basic assumptions you might have about the way nature works for cats, and lots of other predators, don't kill only, or even primarily, out of need. Or, to put it another way, laws of nature and natural law are clear different things.

I thought about that reading an interview with Esther Perel. Perel is a therapist who works with people who have had affairs. In the interview, she notes that the majority of people who do so are happy with their marriage. Lot of research backs her up in this. It's an unsettling proposition because it unsettles the old familiar notion that people cheat because they are living in a love- or sex-starved relationship or marriage. (In my experience, the person who is being starved of sex or love is usually the one being cheated on and not the cheater.)

We don't have to take everything Perel says as gospel, therapy is more of an art than a science, but I think she has some interesting stuff to say. Stuff that might unsettle us in a good way.

... the vast majority of people we come into contact with in our offices are content in their marriages. They are longtime monogamists who one day cross a line into a place they never thought they would go. They remain monogamous in their beliefs, but they experience a chasm between their behavior and their beliefs.

I wrote about this myself three years ago:

Infidelity is also an equal-opportunity affliction. And not just on the receiving end. People of all types cheat on their partners. Even women who find cheating repugnant and who speak scathingly of others who have done this will surprise us and themselves by having affairs.

So it seems to me that the first thing anyone, woman or man, would want to do when thinking about love and commitment is to acknowledge that they are capable of cheating. Actually, that doesn't go nearly far enough. What you need to do is admit that if it ever felt easy and safe enough to get away with, you probably would. I say this because I've lived long enough that I've seen women—quite a few women—seriously mess up because they didn't worry enough about the possibility that they would cheat. They worried plenty about their partner cheating on them but it never occurred them that they could ever do such a thing themselves until they did.

And then they go to see someone like Perel.

If they see Perel in particular, she will tell them that they shouldn't feel so guilty about it. That may strike you as typical therapeutic dismissal of moral and character issues, and that is almost certainly partly the case, but I think she has something right here.

Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.

...

That’s the one word I hear, worldwide—alive! That’s why an affair is such an erotic experience. It’s not about sex, it’s about desire, about attention, about reconnecting with parts of oneself you lost or you never knew existed. It’s about longing and loss. But the American discourse is framed entirely around betrayal and trauma.

It's about "longing and loss". Long time readers might remember my suggesting that that is what Brideshead Revisisted is really about. I think all genuine religious feeling comes out of longing and loss. Waugh was onto something very important when he has Charles Ryder and Julia Mottram find and refind God, respectively, through affairs.

And it's not just Waugh who uses this sort of motive to drive a story of redemption.

The woman said to him,“Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

That, as many will already know, comes from the story of the Samaritan woman at the well.  It's sometimes said that Jesus didn't say much about sexual morality so we should assume he didn't think it that important. But he did say something about it.

Before getting to that, a bit of cultural background. In the antique world women went to the well in groups in the morning. To go alone later in the day when there was a man at the well was a deeply improper act. It's sort of like twerking in a flesh-coloured bikini is now; it sends a message about the woman doing it. The Samaritan woman was looking for sexual attention and the audience John wrote his Gospel for would fully have understood what this woman was going to the well for. They would not have been surprised that Jesus answers the question above by raising questions of sexual morality:

Jesus said to her,
 “Go call your husband and come back.”
The woman answered and said to him,
“I do not have a husband.”
Jesus answered her,
“You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’
For you have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not your husband.
What you have said is true.”

There is some numerology at work here. Seven is the number of completeness. We shouldn't necessarily think that this woman literally had five husbands and one lover before she met Jesus. The point is that she'd had a lot and the Evangelist makes the number symbolically significant in that her final lover, Jesus, is the seventh and therefore the completion of her desire. No, Jesus was not her sexual lover, although, as we shall see, what he does with her does cause scandal. Rather, Jesus offers her something that will fulfill her deeper need which like the cat pursuing mice or the married person pursuing affairs, is not simply a matter of physical need.

Let's go back to what Perel says again:

We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become. 

Isn't that what the woman at the well really wanted too?

Of course, Jesus didn't literally mean that the woman would never be physically thirsty again nor did he mean that she'd never be horny again. She had to drink water the rest of her life and she had sexual needs for the rest of her life too.  I doubt very much that she became celibate after Jesus had left.

Do you feel "really alive" or are you leading a life of quiet desperation?  I ask because if you don't feel really alive you won't be the only one who suffers as a consequence and that will be true whether you actually get around to cheating or not.

Eventually, Perel's non-judgmental attitude towards people having affairs got to be too much for the Hanna Rosin who was interviewing her at Slate and who is, not incidentally, married. Rosin bluntly asked Perel if she recommended having an affair:

No more than I would recommend cancer and yet a lot of people finally understand the value of life when they get sick.

Jesus' disciples were also taken aback at his seeming acceptance of a dubious sexual morality:

At that moment his disciples returned,
and were amazed that he was talking with a woman,
but still no one said, “What are you looking for?”
or “Why are you talking with her?”

The reason they didn't ask those questions is because they thought already knew and they were "amazed". "Shocked" or "scandalized" would be better words.

There is a kind of morality that, particularly when applied to sex, tells us to hate the desire itself. To always regard wanting as a sign that there is something wrong with us. I think Jesus is much closer to Perel and Waugh here than he is to your typical Christian moralist.

A little heavy culture: beauty, truth and goodness

I was having tea with Eliot Girl the other day and we briefly discussed Brideshead Revisited. She disagrees with my interpretation of the book but has not said what she thinks I get wrong, probably out of a desire to avoid a long argument when she'd rather be enjoying her tea. She did say, however, that she thinks I am projecting my own views onto Brideshead.

I don't doubt that a bit. I think it is one of the marks of a truly great novel, and I think Brideshead is the truly great novel of the twentieth century, is that it inspires you to project your deepest beliefs onto it. That is what great novels do—they are a place for us to exercise our moral imagination. The best ones allow us to return to them again and again, learning a bit more from each visit.

Here is someone else doing just that, projecting things onto the novel, and more power to him. That said, he gets a couple of crucial points wrong and he gets them wrong, I think, because he misunderstands the role of beauty in Brideshead.



Let's start with facts as they are clear. Father Barron, a brilliant man, makes what may seem a small mistake but is actually huge. Here is how he describes the chapel at Brideshead (beginning about 1:25 of the video):

At the centre of it is a chapel that is a riot of Baroque decoration the presence of the Eucharist in the chapel meant nothing to Charles when he first came in, he was an agnostic, but he loved the beauty of the place.

Well, actually, no*. One of the big problems for Charles right from the beginning is that he finds the chapel quite ugly and cheap compared to Brideshead. And one of the big reasons he finds it ugly is that it was done over in an arts and crafts style that came off poorly compared to the Baroque splendour of the rest of the house. Here is how it is described in the novel.

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts and crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give the peculiar quality of being moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.

The line where Charles attacks the artist responsible for taking a noble material like oak and carving it, "so as to give the peculiar quality of being moulded in Plasticine,"  shows us how much he disdains what he sees.

By the way, note that the last decade of the 19th century is as close to the figures of the novel as the 1970s is to us. To get an idea of how Charles felt, imagine you are visiting a beautiful Victorian home and find that the living room has been done over in 1970s style.

And it doesn't stop there. Everywhere Charles looks at Catholicism he sees drab ugliness. Nowhere is this more the case than in the morality of the Catholics he encounters. Again, Father Barron gets this backwards.

He meets Sebastian's mother, Lady Marchmain, who is a very devout Catholic, a very morally serious person, and from her he picks up, for the very first time, the moral demand of Catholicism, especially as it pertains to Sebastian's drinking.

Actually, he meets Lady Marchmain and discovers that she is a very manipulative woman. And he meets Bridey and discovers that he is a stiff prig incapable of human connection and Cordelia and discovers that she is a child who prays Novenas for her pet pig. None of these people, despite a whole lot of trying, manage to show Charles the logic behind the moral demand of Catholicism. It is Julia who shows him that in the last third of the novel just as Sebastian shows him the beauty in the first third.

Let's talk Evangelization

Now all this matters because Father Barron has a point to make about Evangelization

The best way to evangelize is to move to the beautiful, then to the good and then to the true.

And he goes on to say that the Catholic church is particularly well placed to do this.

The Catholic church, our genius is that we have embraced the beautiful.

That is well-meaning nonsense from a man who wants to see the good..If only it were true and wouldn't it be nice to think so. Waugh, with his gimlet eye, knew full well that the Catholic church of the 20th century had, in fact, embraced ugliness. She has been responsible for building some of the ugliest churches on the planet. The whole point of evoking the baroque was to recall a past in which the church had been very much invested in beauty.

Waugh also knew that if there was any church that was well placed to evangelize through beauty it was the Anglican church, whose buildings and liturgy were models of restraint and good taste. Waugh's central point was to ask what beauty really is and he found a remnant of it in Catholicism that was so beautiful, so true and so good that it couldn't be trampled by the ugliness of the well-intentioned fools in whose hands the church was left. The light would shine no matter how ugly the actual fixture the light is placed in and no matter how dowdy the people who worship beneath it. A point that is made on the last page of the novel.

"Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been built but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning new among the old stones."

The starting point is not just beauty for lots of things can seem beautiful. Violence is beautiful from certain perspectives.

Beauty, goodness and truth (to put them in the order they are usually presented) play a really important role in Catholic theology. They are the transcendentals; they are the things that we all desire and it is the pursuit of these desires that we can become perfect, "as your Father in heaven is perfect". Ultimately they are a unit (to pursue one is always to pursue the others as well whether we think we intend to or not) but which is the best starting point? What is the best way to draw people into the church?

I think Father Barron is absolutely right that beauty is the place to begin in our age. We live in an ugly age and, as a consequence, we all crave beauty. Despite its many ugly buildings and the appallingly slipshod way the liturgy is presented in many places, the Catholic church is, or could be with a little effort of the right sort, well-placed to evangelize through beauty. But only by turning back and rediscovering the beauties of its past. Father Barron instinctively understands this as all the examples he cites of beauty from within Catholicism are from centuries ago.

Where I think he makes his mistake is with the second move to goodness. In the novel, beauty goes not to goodness but to truth first and that is the way we should go in evangelization. The triumvirate of Lady Marchmain, Bridey and young Cordelia are well chosen for they well-represent the worst traits of modern Catholic moralizing: not a moral but a moralistic approach to life presented through manipulation, smug triumphalism and infantilism.

The last of these is the most dangerous as you can, as an older and wiser Cordelia notes, hate Lady Marchmain. You can also laugh at Bridey but the earnest, seemingly well-meaning but narcissistic morality we see in young Cordelia is much harder to see for the evil it is.

The right way to go is well presented in an old saw: Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. That is to say the law of prayer, then the law of belief and only then the law of living. The three transcendentals are all bound together but we can approach them individually for that very reason. Beauty begins with worship or prayer.

This, by the way, is one of Saint Paul's big points. You can't earn your way into heaven by good conduct. Attempts to become holy by becoming good will always result in evil. Only God's grace can redeem you. And where do you find God's grace? By observing the beauty that surrounds you. Once you become aware of that, you can become aware of the truth about God. The truth of God is not his existence. That's the easy part. Even the most hardened atheist grasps the existence, much as they deny it. They believe he exists and they hate him. The truth of God that is so hard to grasp is that he loves you and he wants you. He wants you more than you want anything. Only once you know that can you work at becoming good because how else could you possible respond to God who loves you so?


* Part of the reason he gets it wrong is clear right from the video itself. As Father Barron is speaking, we see images from Castle Howard. These are the same images used in the TV series and it misrepresents the chapel. The actual chapel that Waugh had in mind was the one at Madresfield Court and it is something else altogether, as you can see at the this site.

A little heavy culture: Disengaged?

Gauis made a comment on one of yesterday's posts that got me to put so much effort into my reponse that I think I'll make it the basis of today's post.

The comment is about the insolubility  of modern arguments pitting rights against morality (and his argument is reminiscent of Alisdair McIntyre's arguments at the beginning of After Virtue.)

I think the most interesting thing is the mix-and-matching of two arguments, which you could call the "public policy" argument and the "morality argument." And this is on both sides. Neither people who feel strongly that gay marriage is wrong on moral-religious grounds, nor people who feel strongly that it is necessary for reasons of justice-rights-morality, are likely to be convinced by arguments that gay marriage is either beneficial or harmful to society. That’s both because such arguments can never be as fully scientific as they claim to be (whose society? What’s ‘harmful’? what’s ‘beneficial’? How can you prove this? Aren’t such arguments inherently ideological? Etc.) and therefore not convincing, but also because (I think) people recognize legal norms as basically the shadow or simulacrum of ‘real’ morality, and to a degree they hold back from recognizing legal-societal norms as fully legitimate.

I think that is exactly right. and I added the following.

At some level, that [meaning seeing "legal norms as basically the shadow or simulacrum of ‘real’ morality"] is inevitable. There is always going to be a gap between a set of legal moral principles and what we believe for ourselves. What seems to have happened lately in our culture is that we no longer even pretend to think that the morality embedded in the law is real. Somewhere on YouTube there is a video of some of the people now loudly proclaiming that same-sex marriage is a right saying that marriage is necessarily between a man and a woman in an equally self-righteous tone. Liberals are fully engaged in mass morality but they think it is endlessly malleable, which is another way of saying it doesn't really exist.

It makes me think of a line originally in the Ferris Bueller script but cut from the final version, "It took you twenty years to find out you don't believe in anything?"

Christians, OTOH, are more and more detached. My wife made a presentation to a group of Anglicans in their 20s and 30s on popular culture a few years ago. These were pretty typical Anglicans, which is to say pretty easy going and willing to accommodate their practices to make living in the modern world easier. The jarring discovery, as my wife put it elsewhere, was that even these easy-going types had created their own world separate from the common culture. She couldn't get them to even begin to engage issues arising from it. For them the only morality that matters is between them and God, except that you wonder how much separate existence they attribute to God as he always seems to tell them they can do the things they really want to do.

I wonder to what extent this is driven by modernism? Modernism has seen a huge revival as the generation raised on Ikea aesthetics have become adults, parents and leaders. As the Lemon Girl and I were saying just the other day, it's not as if the problems that caused modernism to collapse in the early 1960s have been solved or magically gone away. And yet modernism has seized us all by like some sort of irresistible sexual impulse might do.

I am now reading a great little book called Decadent Enchantments which is about how Gregorian chant was revived at the abbey of Saint Pierre at Solesmes. It's a fascinating story and is very well told by Katherine Bergeron. She makes two fascinating distinctions. (Fascinating to me, anyway, I suspect this may end up being the least-read post in the history of this blog.)

The first distinction is between the situation at the end of the French revolution versus the normal decline and fall of cultures. Most cultures leave some ruins. Which is to say that, however much wanton destruction takes place, there are usually ruins that become ruins through decay. The situation for a religious revival at the end of the French revolution was different. Everything thing had been destroyed or, worse, removed from its historic setting and placed in a museum. The French word "vandalisme" (the source of our English word) was coined to describe this new kind of destruction. Bergeron says that the restorers saw what was left as an era of debris rather than an era of ruins.

For the Romantic spectator, then, the violent dislocation of historic monuments offered an image not so much of decay as of debris. The sight of such fragmented remains [in a museum] could produce no meaningful "effects", to use Chateaubriand's word, because these broken pieces no longer possessed the aura of pastness. It was the very existence of debris, a vulgar index of revolutionary change, that seemed to enable this new Romantic ideal of decay. Decay emerged as a countersign, a shadowy figure of not-change imagined, by necessity, as aura surrounding the now lamented natural ruin was a haunted sign, a ghostly specter of lost presence. Decay as such, together with the past plenitude it embodied, became poetic at the moment when debris had effectively taken it's place. (From Decadent Enchantments by Katherine Bergeron, p. 4)

That should be familiar to readers Brideshead Revisisted as it is exactly the attitude of Charles Ryder. I think it needs some work as no fully sound argument will include ugly expressions like "pastness" and "not-change".

Anyway, she then goes on to distinguish between that Romantic attitude and a later Modernist understanding that saw restoration as possibly "recreating" a form of life that "may have never existed".

It is perhaps not surprising that, perched on a hinge between two centuries, the figures of Pothier and and Mocquereau should be seen to swing in such different directions, betraying historical orientations that might be called, for convenience's sake, Romantic and Modern. For Pothier, Gregorian history appeared as an the aura of time imaginatively experienced by one who, standing at the end of the historical continuum looks back—collecting the accumulated reside of the past into a single aesthetic moment. For Mocquereau, such history appeared as a new beginning, a field of possibilities so vast it's ultimate truth, though glimpsed in the present, could only be assigned to some distant future.

The odd thing about right now is that "Modernism" itself has become part of the debris that the Ikea generation has picked up and "restored". Progressives and the few remaining liberal Christians  tend to be "Romantic" about this restored Modernism—that is they see it as an opportunity to put themselves at the end of an historical continuum. The group I see myself in, which includes a lot of the younger Christians I have been working with, on the other hand, tend to be "Modernist" about a restored Romantic Christianity, seeing it as fragmented but offering a glimpse at an ultimate truth to be realized in the future.

Waugh's Rossetti book

I've finished it now. It's uneven. There are bits, especially when Waugh moves from straight narrative to critical analysis that are weak enough to justify his embarrassment. But it's a treasure trove for Brideshead fans. Here are three examples.

1. In Brideshead we get Collins' refulation of modern aesthetic theory:

Collins had exposed the fallacy of of modern aesthetics to me: '... the whole argument from Significant Form stands or falls by volume. If you allow Cézanne to represent a third dimension on his two dimensional canvas, then you must allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel's eye'...

In Rossetti we get not the same argument but one that closely parallels it. Waugh defends the literary quality of Rossetti's painting. What he means by that is that Rossetti's paintings often refer to some "literary" moment. This need not be to some particular existing bit of literature but just the sense that there is some story behind the image. Our grasp of Rossetti's painting The Beloved, for example, to some extend depends on our grasping that this is a painting of a bride and her attendant women.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Roger Fry would have us look at a painting like that oblivious of any content and merely study the form. Our considering that this is a woman, that she is a bride, that she is not any bride but the bride from the Song of Songs et cetera would, in Fry's view, only cheapen our appreciation, would make it impure. That is what Waugh means by literary painting. With that background, you can see how this argument from the Rossetti book is very close to what Collins says in Brideshead:

It seems to me that the defence for 'literary' painting, if defence is needed—and not only for Rossetti, but for the sermonising of Hunt and even the chattiness of Frith—lies in the very word used in its condemnation. Why of the Arts should literature alone be expected to be 'impure'? Why, because we are accustomed to expressing our daily wants in words, shall poetry be allowed to traffic with other emotions besides the aesthetic emotion? If I may legitimately be frightened by The Ancient Mariner, why may I not also be by Wiertz?

2. At the very end of the Rossetti book Waugh condemns Rossetti and then finds some sort of special inspiration at work in him.

There is a spiritual inadequacy, a sense of ill-organization about all that he did. ...

... The problem is that here and there in his life he seems, without ever feeling it, to have transcended this inadequacy in a fashion that admits of no glib explanation. ... so Rossetti's art, at fitful moments, flames into the exquisite beauty of Beata Beatrix. It is the sort of problem that modern aesthetics does not seem capable of coping with.

A bit earlier he says,

The truth, as has been suggested before, is that Rossetti was unrestrained, as no artist of importance had been before, by any adequate system either devised by himself or imposed on him by convention. He was guided entirely by his own momentary preferences for a face or piece of patterned stuff, and by those of his clients, but there was in him errant and erring, streak of the purest genius, and it is typical that his next work ... [Emphasis added]

Let's leave his next work on hold for a moment and return to Brideshead and Charles' description of his experience painting Marchmain House just before it's destruction:

I held back from painting, like a diver on the water's edge; once in I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberative painter; that afternoon and all the next day, and the day after, I worked fast. I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid to start the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it on the palate; each brush stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.

That is a painter who is very like Rossetti in some ways. Charles has an errant and erring streak of genius. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it leads him to produce good art, other times it leads him to South America.

3. Saving the most obvious parallel for last, there is the next work from above, the Beata Beatrix:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Waugh quotes Rossetti describing his painting,

"You will remember how Dante dwells on the desolation of the city in connection with the incident of her [Beatrice's] death ..."

That probably feels familiar to anyone who has read Brideshead. Dante quotes a passage from the Lamentations of Jeremiah and Rossetti had these words carved into the frame of the Beata Beatrix:

Quomodo sedet sola civitas! 'How doth the city sit solitary that was so full of people; how she is become a widow that was great among the nations.'

In the novel, after sitting watching Charles paint Marchers, Cordelia describes the chapel that is no longer a chapel using the same quotation.

"... I stayed there until he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't a chapel theer any more, just an oddly decorated room, I can't tell you what it felt like. You've never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?"

"Never."

"well, if you had, you'd know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas ... it's a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear it."

Of course, Charles is also a very different painter. His passion turns to buildings and the reasons they were built. Rossetti, and I'm with him on this, always turns to women.

Waugh's Rossetti book ...

... is finally available again. This is cause for celebration among Brideshead fans everywhere.

Rossetti: His Life and Works was Waugh's first book. It was published because Waugh had a connection to a publisher through Anthony Powell. Waugh had no special qualifications to write the book and it is highly unlikey that he would have been chosen to write it without that connection. Even within the circle of Waugh and Powell's friends there were several people better qualified to write the book.

Not surprisingly, Waugh was embarrassed by the work once his career was established he never allowed it to be printed again.

But now Penguin is setting about publishing the complete Waugh and volume one is the Rossetti book. I got an electronic copy.

It's better than you would think reading Waugh's own assessment of the book. It's not the best book if you want to know about Rossetti but you won't go far wrong in reading it either.

And it is a great book if you want to know how the young Waugh thought about aesthetics and art. And that is something really useful if you want to deepen your understanding of Brideshead Revisited.

Anyone who has read Brideshead more than once will have noticed that there is an aesthetic argument underlying the whole thing. When Charles says he went from the puritan asceticism of Ruskin to that of Fry, he (and Waugh) are assuming a whole language, a language that is drawn from aesthetic arguments from Waugh's youth.

Short version, Waugh didn't like the moderns but he didn't like classicism either. He liked art that was passionate and Rossetti was a key figure in the story for him. He doesn't revere Rossetti but he sees something very right about him. And Rossetti was clearly a major figure in Waugh's artistic development.

I'm on the second last section but I can already concluded that this book is well worth the time of anyone who loves Brideshead.

Before moving on

Of the many overlapping details between the first volume of Dance and Brideshead, one of the most fascinating is Hubert Duggan.

Hubert Duggan was a real guy and he was the source of two characters who don't seem to have that much in common at first glance. Anthony Powell, drawing on his school days, made him the basis of Charles Stringham. Evelyn Waugh, drawing more heavily on his later years and death, made him the model for Lord Marchmain. Duggan's death featured a final visit from a priest (brought by Evelyn Waugh over the objections of others) with results very much like what we see in Brideshead.

It's fascinating to me that the model for Sebastian's father was actually a boy the same age as him.

What definitely is true of both Stringham and Lord Marchmain is there their charm and likability. Both light up the page when they appear. Even later when, well I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but even later when things have changed, Stringham is a man you'd like to associate with.

Some readers may be relieved to know that that is the probably the end of comparisons between the two books. The next volume in the Powell series, A Buyer's Market, goes off in a very different direction and the two worlds never cross again.

Volume 1 finished

I got to the end of A Question of Upbringing last night. One thing about A Dance to the Music of Time is that while it may be twelve volumes long, the volumes aren't nearly as long as Proust. Powell's twelve volumes take up the same amount of space on my shelf as four of Proust's seven volumes do.

I don't know Dance nearly as well as I know Brideshead so I couldn't presume to got at it in anything like the same depth. I'm also feeling a little humbled at how much I missed on previous readings.

The first time I read it I was a teenager and I found Dance on my parents' shelves. For some reason they didn't own volume one so I was about half way through when I went back to find the first. There were only ten volumes published at the time and my parents had lost interest somewhere around the sixth volume so that was where their collection stopped. I went to that first volume expecting to find certain things—I particularly hoped for more about Oxford—and I was disappointed by what I did find.

Reading it this time, I was staggered at how much I missed.

For example, the book opens with a reference back to an imagined classical past. And then a little later, Stringham quotes the poem "Heraclitus" to Le Bas and Le Bas says,

'... Very Good. In fact, alpha plus. It has all the same note of nineteenth century nostalgia for a classical pas largely of their own imagining.'

 So we already have one layer upon another. Our narrator has compared his remembering his school days to an imagined vision of the classical past.

There are even more layers for "Heraclitus" was written William Johnson Cory who was a former master at Eton who was famous for his teaching and for what his students went on to do in life. Le Bas obviously attempts to imitate him and we see this when he shows up at Oxford to visit Nick at the end. It's a cruel scene as Powell plays it with poor Le Bas barely able to remember anything important about his former students.

So what can and cannot be trusted about the memories here? From the perspective of 1951, the 1920s were very much a distant past largely of people's imagination.

Brideshead similarities
Because it covers so much of the same stuff, there are resemblances to stuff that happens in Brideshead. We have a slippery don named Sillery who resembles Mr. Samgrass. For what it is worth (not much I would guess), Wikipedia insists that Sillery is not based on Maurice Bowra but allows that many people thought he was.

What is fascinating for our purposes is that Powell has Nick see him as a kind of Tiresias, a hermaphrodite figure who can emphasize a male or female part of his character to different people.

Finally, for now, there is a car ride wherein two tarty girls are picked up that ends in a crash. The police are not involved but it marks a clear turning point in the characters' lives. Again, though, Powell is moving out to new discoveries. Waugh focuses on loss and intimacy. It's fascinating to see two writers using a very similar, almost identical, set of childhood experiences to achieve very different ends.

Powell and Waugh on first loves

Reading the beginning of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time last night I found an interesting example of Powell using a similar metaphor to one that Waugh uses to speak of early experiences of sexual love BUT, and this is fascinating, even in using the similar metaphor to describe the same thing the two novelists are clearly headed in different directions.

Here is Powell first. Peter Templer has just returned from London where he has had sex with a woman he picked up on the street and he has told Nick and Charles about this adventure that he has had and they have not. And Powell has Nick use the metaphor of a door opening to describe his feelings about it.

This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if sounds of a far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before.

These are young men, in the last years of high school in our terms, and the image of the door is meant to signify a leaving behind of the cloistered days of youth and entering the public world of adulthood—a particularly powerful image given that they are sharing tea in their private room at what Powell has described as the "medieval closes" of Eton as Nick experiences this moment. For Powell, sex is the ticket to admission to a ballroom full of shouting and music.

If we compare this with Waugh's use of the mysterious-door-now-open in describing how Charles reacts to meeting Sebastian for the first time, we can see the same metaphor used towards describing sexual experience toward a different end.

... I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find the 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.

Here the door opens on a  secret world of intimate love. A love that opens, not on and adult world of shouting and music, but on a secret garden that is like a new kind of childhood. A secret intimacy that contains intimations of a connection with God—"Suffer the little children to come unto me".

And the obvious question for our private reflections here is which of these two most closely corresponds to my experience of sexual love? Was sex for me a way to leave behind a protected world of childhood and enter into the risky rewards of adulthood? Or was it the way into a secret, intimate world of naughtiness that in some ways recreated childhood? Or was it one and then the other? Or was it one and, looking back, I wish it had been the other?

I would never discuss the answers to those questions publicly but they strike me as very important questions.


PS: I know some of you will wondering about a certain famous book about an enclosed garden. Well, Evelyn Waugh was just eight years old the year Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden was published. I have no idea whether or not he read it as a child but you do have to suspect he did.

Anthony Powell

I picked up A Dance to the Music of Time again. This has long been a favourite. It's twelve volumes long though so I don't think I'll blog my way through it (not this year anyway). But there were a couple of things in the opening that I think fascinating.

The first of these is the quality of the opening. This book is often compared to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Waugh Brideshead Revisited. The comparison to Waugh irked Powell a bit because, while the content and style of his book is very similar to what Waugh wrote, his aim was very different. Waugh wrote in classic English novel style—a book with a beginning, middle and end leading up to a happy ending  (of a sort)—while Powell is a pagan through and through; his philosophy is what I call "Nietzschean Naturalism". It's plot runs in cycles with the same sorts of things happening over and over again.

Anyway, the thing that hits me every time I pick it up is this, Powell's opening is perfect. Really, if you are a writer or a fan of writing, you should do yourself a favour and read the first ten pages of volume one (it's called A Question of Upbringing). I think that Proust and Waugh outstrip Powell over the long haul but neither of them wrote an opening anywhere near this good.

One of the brilliant things Powell does is the way he introduces the character named "Widmerpool". Kenneth Widmerpool is Powell's greatest creation but it's rarely noted that Powell meant him to be. When Verdi needed a popular song for the Duke to sing in Rigoletto he sat down and wrote one. Some people can do that. Mozart could also say, "I'm going to write a popular song," and then just do it. Beethoven couldn't. Anyway, that is what Powell does he. He decided to create an unforgettable character and then he just did it. Amazing.

The third thing that hits me about the opening is something that will be familiar to anyone who followed the Brideshead Revisited thread here. The following is an extended bit of dialogue from the opening, see if you can figure out what is going on. The first speaker is a guy named Charles Stringham. He is telling Nicholas Jenkins something another boy named Peter Templer told him about Widmerpool:

'As we walked past the fives courts, Templer remarked: "I'm glad that ass Widmerpool fielded a banana with his face." I asked why he did not like him—for after all there is little harm in the poor old boy—and it turned out that it was Widmerpool who got Akworth sacked.'

Stringham paused to allow this statement to sink in, while he arranged the sausages in a new pattern. I could not recall clearly what Akworth's story had been: though I remembered that he had left the school under a cloud soon after my arrival there, and that various rumours regarding his misdoings had been current at the time.

'Akworth tried to set his room on fire, didn't he? Or did he steal everything that not nailed down?'

'He may well have done both,' said Stringham; 'but he was principally shot out for sending a note to Peter Templer. Widmerpool intercepted the note and showed it to Le Bas. I must admit that it was news to me when Peter told me.

'And that was why Peter had taken against Widmerpool?'

'Not only that but Widmerpool got hold of Peter and gave him a tremendous jaw on morals.'

I'll stop there but it goes on a while and every bit of it is magnificent.

It's very inside writing. "The school" for example: Powell tells us the style of architecture and describes the nearby town and the gasworks but never gives it a name. We're just to know that it's Eton.

And the note. That's a fascinating detail don't you think? No one gets thrown out of school for sending notes. It's what's in the note that does it. But what's in it? Something immoral. I know, I know, not with the boys with boys sex again and, well, sorry, but that is what it is but it's played so subtly you could easily miss it.

Great stuff and I recommend it highly.

Extra Brideshead bonus
Do you  remember Olive Banks whom Cordelia was devoting a decade of her daily rosary too? Charles asked about her and Cordelia explained:

'She [Olive] was bunked from the convent last term. I don't quite know what for. Reverend Mother found something she'd been writing.

We might also remember that Anthony brings the very same charge against Sebastian as Templer does against Widmerpool above:

'I left under what is called  cloud, you know—I can't think why it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light; the process involved a series of harrowing interviews with m' tutor. It was disconcerting to find out how observant that mild old man proved to be. The things he knew about me, which I though no one—except possibly Sebastian—knew. It was a lesson never to trust mild old men—or charming school boys; which?

The school in question is also Eton. It's amazing what comes along with a first class education. In any case, it doesn't reflect very well on Sebastian does it?

What Waugh didn't like about Julia's speech

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter 3
For many critics, the big problem with Brideshead is that it is not realistic. But realism is a nebulous thing. There is. for example, a site on the web that offers students information for essay writing that says the following with great authority

... and one Anthony Blanche, a ridiculous character who, as scholars say, embodies every gay stereotype of Waugh’s era. He also speaks with an affected stutter.

I don't know which "scholars" are supposed to have said this but Anthony Blanche is a very realistic portrayal of a guy named Brian Howard and there are other verbal portraits of him that confirm Waugh's. It is the scholars who are deluding themselves because they so desperately want to believe that these are just stereotypes. All gay men are not now, and were not then, like Anthony Blanche but there are people today who fit the type and it isn't hard to find them. And they are not, as the supposedly "unbiased" author of the above would have it "ridiculous".

Imagine if I wrote the story of an ordinary middle class kid who never did anything to change the world but I had as one character in his life a supreme court judge whom this kid knows and talks to. You might be inclined to think, what  a crock, ordinary kids don't get to confide with supreme court judges. But that story is very real for you see it is my story. Every famous person knows some ordinary people.

The point being that one of the most common criticisms of Brideshead is bogus. It is often said that the people portrayed are not realistic because they are not typical. And while it is true they are not typical, they were very real. Every character in this book is like people Waugh actually knew. In one sense at least, this is very much a realistic book.

The other criticism is that Waugh is too close, too enamoured about the people he is writing about to be realistic. And yet, if we actually read the book, we can see that this too is unfair. The presentation of these people is not sycophantic or fawning, it's actually quite cold and critical.

So what is it that bothers critics? Well, a big part is the fact that the novel is Catholic and, little as they like to admit it, many critics don't want a novel in which a man is convincingly converted to Catholicism. But, more than that, the novel uses some of modernism's favourite techniques to undermine modernism. It isn't the snobbish story of aristocratic glory that critics attack but it is very much a capital-R Romanticism we are reading here.

Romanticism
Seen from enough distance, patterns begin to emerge that cannot be seen from close up. That, at least, is the ideology. And the standard story that goes with it is like this: for a long time the people lived in darkness and then came the Enlightenment and scientific and political progress; but the Enlightenment had excesses and in response to that there arose a movement called Romanticism; and Romanticism, however, was slowly overcome by Modernism; eventually Modernism itself was replaced by Postmodernism. The story gets a bit murky here, however, because nobody really knows what Modernism was supposed to be about and that makes defining Postmodernism difficult.

As I've said before, you can see the problem right in the word "Postmodernism" which, like Post-Impressionism from which it descends, tries to define something by a negative quality. People only do that when they don't know what to say and decide to get by by faking it.

But the whole idea that we see things better from a distance, that is dispassionately, is an Enlightenment idea. The whole idea that history divides into periods that represent a progress from darkness to greater and greater levels of ... well of enlightenment is an Enlightenment idea.

Romanticism, on the other hand, has never really gone away. If you think it has, I have two words for you: Harry Potter. Or the Lord of the Rings, or teenage-girl vampire fiction. In fact, perhaps the most embarrassing secret for those who wish to be modern or enlightened is that Romanticism has always been the art of the modern era.

In many ways we might say that far from moving from Enlightenment to Romanticism to Modernism to Postmodernism, we've actually been having the same argument between a kind of Progressivism and Romanticism. People keep buying Romanticism even while our betters keep pushing us to accept an art they feel is more in accord with the modern world.

Through it all, the rallying cry of the Progressives is that we must see things dispassionately, from a distance, so we can see them as they really are. They accuse Romantics for failing to do this and, therefore, of embracing a past that never was.

And Waugh?
We can see the contradictions in reactions to Waugh. Here is Charles Rolo in The Atlantic of October, 1954.

The paradox, in fact, is that when Waugh is being comic, he makes luminous the failures of his age, confronts us vividly with the desolating realities; and when he is being serious, he is liable to become trashy. For without the restraints of the ironic stance, his critical viewpoint reveals itself as bigoted and rancorous; his snobbery emerges as obsessive and disgusting; and his archaism involves him in all kinds of silliness. 

Rolo is only one of many critics who keep telling us this about Waugh. And he is only one of many who keeps telling us that we shouldn't like the side of Waugh that we like the most, that is the Romantic side. Back in 1954, Rolo was obliged to admit the following:

Despite the fact that Brideshead Revisited -- which introduces the "later" or "serious" Evelyn Waugh -- has sold many more copies in the United States than all of Waugh's other books put together, his name, at least among the literary -- is still most apt to evoke a singular brand of comic genius. 

It is now more than five decades since Rolo wrote that and the gap between sales of Brideshead and all of Waugh's other books put together has grown. And, to be rude about it, the reputation of our betters—"the literary" as Rolo would have it—has plunged to the point that their very future is in doubt. Humanities, once the largest faculty at most universities, now attracts about one in ten students. Magazines such as The Atlantic have a very uncertain future and only survive because of cost-cutting and patronage.

The contradictions of realism
In one way or another, the anti-Romantics have always been realists of a sort. They have always accused the Romantics of embracing not just illusions but, and this is the more important part, embracing illusions that have no place in the modern world. One of the early moves was straight realism. If art could simply represent the world as it was, it would conquer Romantic illusions.

It didn't work out as planned.

Here are two paintings of the Annunciation. Neither is a realist painting but the second might be said to be more realist than the first.

And here we see a number of paradoxes here. The first is that the more realist of the two paintings is the second one that is more likely to give us a sense that a supernatural event like the Annunciation could actually take place. Rossetti's Mary has a Halo and Rossetti's angel's feet are not actually touching the ground and yet everything else is close enough to real that we can imagine the picture without either of those two supernatural details. In a modern movie, the Angel could be a guy who just shows up in Mary's room.

The Burne Jones painting, on the other hand, is clearly mythological. And yet, Burne Jones, as I've remarked before, can be more honest in his portrayal than Rossetti as we will note that his Mary, as we would expect in a young woman, has very nice, touchable-looking breasts. Rossetti's Mary (his sister was the model if I remember correctly) doesn't seem to have entered puberty yet.

And those are the contradictions of realism. It seems to subvert its own aims in that you can use very realistic representations to make the unreal more convincing. Realism always turns out to be just a series of stylistic conventions that promise honesty.

Conversely, non-realist art can often be honest in ways that realist art cannot. Even today, you would cause scandal if you crossed the two paintings. If someone re-did the Rossetti painting above but gave Mary a convincing sexual presence–imagine her bra-less breasts pressing through that thin fabric and you will see the problem. It is only by making her mythological that Burne Jones can get away with painting Mary as a fully sexed woman.

Waugh plays with these paradoxes all the time. As Rolo dimly recognizes, it is in the exaggerations for comic effect that Waugh is most bluntly honest. But he fails to see that Waugh is not deluding himself when he writes more realistically. Rolo may mock Waugh for being a snob with a taste for the archaic and things aristocratic but he could not possibly mock Waugh more mercilessly than Waugh mocks himself for these things. When Waugh writes realistically, as he does in Brideshead, he does so with the explicit intention of undermining our sense of the real. And he lets us know this is plain language when Charles tell us (in "Brideshead Deserted", chapter 1):

I had left behind me—what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, 'the Young Magician's Compendium', that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.

'I have left behind illusion,' I said to myself. 'Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.'

I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

His goal is quite clear here. Charles is embracing the real only to find that the real isn't real; it is only realism which is to say it is just a  series of stylist conventions.

And we see that happening in this chapter (A Twitch on the Thread" Chapter 3) as we see Charles, admitting even in the seemingly Idyllic moments that open the chapter that he "feared to break the spell of memories." As the chapter goes on we see Charles, the one who is trying to be realistic, increasingly forced to resort to artistic images to try and deal with what is troubling Julia by using art to explain reality. The height of which is his pulling out Ruskin's description of Holman Hunt's painting to try and convince Julia that her reaction to Bridey's comment about "living in sin" was just something psychological and his attempts to bring about a reconciliation between he and Julia by comparing their lives to a drama.

And that, for Waugh, is the problem with Julia's speech. It does not follow realistic conventions. Waugh knows full well that the problem is not whether a person might or might not say such a thing in real life but whether we would accept it as realistic. As he writes in the preface:

I have been in two minds as to the treatment of Julia's outburst about mortal sin and Lord Marchmain;'s dying soliloquy. These passages were never, of course, intended to report words actually spoken. They belong to a different way of writing from, say, the early scenes between Charles and his father. I would not now introduce them into a novel which elsewhere aims at verisimilitude.

His goal was to write in a  style that appears to be real as a way to undermine realism. As such, these two speeches don't really belong here. Both are much liked by some readers as Waugh points out. I feel that way about Lord Marchmain's dying soliloquy. But I'm not sure about Julia's outburst. I'm going to linger on it a while. More this afternoon.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

A small break

The Season of Brideshead
Running out to the fountain

Note: On Tuesday, traffic dropped to half of what it usually is and then, yesterday, it dropped to about one tenth. People are obviously traveling for Christmas. I'm not traveling because I already live in a perfect place but I will be taking a little break. Brideshead blogging will resume on Monday.

Meanwhile, here is the question: What is wrong with the fountain scene?

When he revised the book, Waugh noted that two of the speeches—Julia at the fountain and another by Lord Marchmain coming up—simply had no place in a realistic novel. He had a point. Both are more like soliloquies than like real speech.

And yet neither harms the novel; and this is odd because they both seem crucial.

But it seems to me that there is a bigger problem with the Julia speech and that is that it isn't psychologically plausible. It's the wrong emotion. Julia simply would not break down like that. It's not that some people wouldn't react that way but Waugh has done nothing to prepare us for this. It doesn't fit the Julia we know. And in the end it is another emotion, anger, that actually makes the difference.

Anyway, much more on that and on Tintern Abbey starting Monday.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Contra Mundum

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter two
The expression "contra mundum" has a history by the way (almost everything in this novel has a history). It is associated with Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria who "won" the Council at Nicea. He won in the sense that he managed to convince the Council to support the doctrine that God the Father and Christ had both always existed as opposed to the belief that God the Father had created Christ at a particular time in history, a view known as Arianism. And thus the Nicene Creed.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.

Athanasius was famous for taking on the whole world and never once flinching in his opposition to Arianism. He suffered exile and abuse rather than give in. Although the decision at Nicea went his way, he was shortly afterward sent into exile because of the political enemies he made. So much so that the expression "Athanasius contra mundum" came to mean going a little crazy in the defence of truth as you see it.

Which is not what we imagine Sebastian as having been up to is it? But he is. You might say that he stands no matter what the cost against what his mother was, in Cordelia's words, striving to be saintly instead striving to be a saint.

The temptation when we read Julia saying, 'Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world?' is to think, 'Well, this can't really be love; love is a good thing and will have good effects.' But a certain kind of Christian can never believe that love will necessarily have good effects in this world.


The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

"You see, it's all happened before"

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter two
One of the deceptive things about reading any old book is that things change. The last chapter, for example, was set on a grand old ocean liner. We look back on such a thing with nostalgia, everything acquires a brown tint like an old photograph. At the time, however, the ocean liner was the latest thing. It was the symbol of everything that was new and stylish. Waugh underlines this by having Julia say that there is something about it that makes everyone behave like a film star. He underlines this by having the Hollywood director and Celia's suggestion that Charles talk to him about set design while describing the boat itself like a Hollywood film set. And he underlines this by talking about the modern conveniences such as there only being chilled or hot water on board.

And then the storm to show that even such very modern luxuries are fragile.

And that is perhaps the most important thing for us to remember when reading this book. It describes a period between storms. Between one horrid war and another even more horrid. Millions had died in the first and they had imagined they were fighting a war to end war. And then here we are again.

Painful repetitions haunt the novel.

A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be born—that was how it felt ....

We can imagine this a little. We know what it is like to fall into the same bad habit again and again. The sister you always have a fight with and you start off every time meaning not to and then things start to go off the rails like they always do. The frustration we have meaning to change some bad habit, get out and exercise, but we do just what we always do instead.

That's the sense that Waugh is counting on and I think he achieves very well. We read this chapter with an awful sense of dread. That is why people so often remember the first part as being about halcyon days in Oxford and the second about this horrible loss. In fact, there is very little happiness in the first part. There at least seems to be more in the second part. But we read every page waiting for that blow.

And so, we reach the very last page of the chapter and read this:

'Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.'

And we think, 'Oh crap, it's contra mundum again; Julia's demons are haunting her the same way Sebastian's did him and now the same horrid things are going to happen again.' So, from now on, nothing can be as beautiful as those few fleeting moments of bliss in the first part because we've been through this before. Somewhere along the line someone explained to us that 'et in Arcadia ego' was death speaking and he was saying that even in our most blissful moments he is already there and now we can't pretend. We cower like a regularly beaten dog waiting for it all to go wrong again.

The flaneur
In chapter two of book one and again here in book three, Waugh relies heavily on a realist technique originally developed by Flaubert. A flaneur is a like a loiterer only with, as a great Muriel Sparks title has it, someone loitering with intent.

Picture a young woman in a bar. She is hoping something will happen. She wants a magical meeting leading to romance, adventure or maybe just dirty sex. So she sits there in sexy clothes hoping the right person will approach her. Meanwhile she is recording what is happening around her in a bored way. She isn't like a camera because a camera doesn't care and she cares, she just doesn't particularly care about what is happening just now. So she runs through the details of what is happening in an impassive way. The details seem random. The walls were green; a middle-aged woman who didn't look like the type to sit in a bar alone was looking for something in her purse, perhaps money, maybe her cell phone so she could call the friend who was late; over in the corner, two young men were sitting at the table of an older man she thought might be gay and she wondered if they were negotiating something or, and she worried about this a bit, if they were setting him up so they could rob him or even just beat him up; in the background, as if her thoughts had caused them to respond, she heard a police car coming down the boulevard its siren wailing. Suddenly, the siren got louder, and she turned to see that it was because the door had opened and she saw three girls her own age who had wandered in. They stood there at the door and scanned the room. They were girls from her college and they too had somehow decided to enter this bar, a bar the students never went to because it had a reputation. She noticed one of the girls eyes settle on her and felt herself being assessed. The other two girls don't notice her but one of them said, "Let's get out of here," and they all laughed as if they all had simultaneously decided that they could never imagine sitting in such a place; as if they couldn't imagine allowing their skin to touch the upholstery.

That's the style. It's a familiar style now, I just made that paragraph up. It's a realist style

Waugh kicks the style in in a big way this chapter. And so we float along as the Duke of Clarence comes in and we see that he is a twit. And then Mr. Samgrass makes a brief appearance. And then the critics. And then a photographer. And then and then. All the time we are waiting for a moment with Julia again. But then Anthony shows up and delivers another remonstrance just like he does in chapter two of book one. And if you go back to that chapter, you'll notice that Waugh uses the flaneur technique there too.

Although Waugh moves us much faster here. he takes two whole chapters to get from the two remonstrances in chapter two to the train ride to Brideshead at the end of chapter three with the cutlery jingling. Here that takes only one very short chapter to get from remonstrance to a train ride with, and this repetition is no accident, cutlery jingling. The seeming halcyon days will arrive with chapter three this time. This, of course, increases our sense of doom. The last time we went to hell in a hand cart, this time we're on the express elevator.

Like in book one, the days are significant. This time it's Friday. The entire thing happens on Friday. The key moment is when Charles, sometime mid afternoon on Friday (What other event happened mid afternoon on Friday?) remembers his last exhibition when he had detected Celia in adultery. And he tells us:

 I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.

Do you believe that? I don't. He has let slip his own, repeated affairs earlier. This sounds more like a man who has convinced himself that he has been wronged when he was really just looking for an excuse to leave Celia all along. That brief, sly lapse of hers. "Manumission" means to be set free from enslavement and Charles was no slave. Following this moment, there is a sort of trip to the underworld and a return.And then a train ride.

But things aren't exactly the same. This time Charles is impervious to Anthony's criticism. Like last time, he recognizes that Anthony has a point but now he doesn't care. It's well-reasoned abuse but the Charles who hears it this time has hardened himself to life.

And I think that is the sleight of hand here. Waugh the conjurer has us paying attention to Julia with his right hand while he pulls a switch with his left. We're all worried about what is up with Julia; with her personal demons and how they are going to tear her and Charles apart. Meanwhile, though, something is happening with Charles; something in him, as Anthony says, has died.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Revisiting that Bellini

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch on a Thread, Chapter one
 I have finaly gotten around to looking up the iconography of the two Johns: that is Evangelist and Baptist.

John the Evangelist is typically represented with an eagle, sometimes with a cup with a  viper in it and  with a book meant to represent his Gospel.

John the Baptist is represented wearing rough clothing or skins, carrying a long cross in one hand and with either a lamb or with a text showing the words Agnus Dei (Lamb of God).

Knowing that, my earlier suspicions are confirmed: the guy on the left below is obviously John the Baptist. (Okay, it was more than a suspicion but I decided to check anyway, something Wikipedia obviously did not do.)

The image is courtesy of Wikipedia who label him incorrectly as John the Evangelist. As a rule, Wikipedia is always unreliable about controversial issues but this tells us they can get even what ought to be straightforward wrong.

Anyway, why should we care about which saint it is with regards to Brideshead. Well, maybe we shouldn't except that there is this interesting dialogue in this chapter. Julia has just asked Charles why he ever married Celia. He answers:

'Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.'

'You loved him, didn't you/'

'Oh yes, he was the forerunner.'

Julia understood.

She did, did she? I think that is one of Waugh's weaker moments. It strikes me as a mind-bogglingly oafish thing for a man to say to a woman and I have a hard time imagining Julia understanding or accepting this. It could easily have been fixed too. All Waugh had to do was have Ryder tell us this thought directly.

In any case, the point I want to make here is that John the Baptist is, in Christian thought, the forerunner of Christ. When I Google "John the Baptist" and "Forerunner" I get 581 thousand hits as of December 21, 2010. (Check for yourself here.) He is the one who rises to prominence and then must diminish in order that Christ can increase. (There is a great sermon by Saint Augustine where he says that John's feast is on June 24, after which the days get shorter, diminish, until the feast of Christ's birth on December 25, after which they increase. He's off by a couple of days but it's a nice metaphor.)

In any case, the point is pretty straightforward: Sebastian is now cast in the role of the Baptist, in which case, Charles is wrong thinking Sebastian was the forerunner for Julia. He is the forerunner for someone just not Julia.

The remaining pictures here are the Annunciation over the top (which occurs in Luke's Gospel not John's), Saint Sebastian in the middle and Saint Anthony of the desert on the right. So, wouldn't it be just too weird if the next iteration we get of Sebastian turned out to be him living a monastic life in North Africa?

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

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.

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.