Lear, Kent, Fool

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter one

What does this bit of dialogue mean?

Soon only Julia, my wife, and I were left at table, and, telepathically, Julia said, 'Like King Lear.'

'Only each of us is all three of them.'

'What can you mean?' asked my wife.

'Lear, Kent Fool.'

'Oh dear, it's like that agonizing Foulenough conversation over again. Don't try and explain.'

'I doubt if I could,' I said.

I'm not sure I can do much better.

Well, in a sense it is easy. These three are alone in the face of the storm just like the three characters in Lear. And each of them has been the noble one and who has failed to live up to the standards expected of their nobility (Lear). Each of them has been the stalwart subject standing nobly by another (Kent). And each of them has been cheated upon and cheated themselves (playing the Fool).

There are a lot of things from Lear that appear in this last part of Brideshead: there is an illegitimate child, there are multiple betrayals, there is a storm, there is a rightful heir who is disinherited in favour of a younger child, there is a daughter named Cordelia who, alone among her siblings, will not flatter her father. And there must be more.

But there is another sense in which I think Charles (but not Waugh) is completely missing the point. Lear's tragedy is provoked when Lear refuses to live up to his proper role. This starts a chain of events wherein everyone forgets their proper role and place in life and everyone abandons and betrays him.

Only Kent will stand by his King and what is perhaps the key bit of dialogue comes when Kent shows up and drives the horrible Oswald away:

Come, sir, arise, away! I'll teach you differences.
Away, away! if you will measure your lubber's
length again, tarry: but away! go to; have you
wisdom? So!

"I'll teach you differences" means, I'll teach you to know your place and rank but the lesson is not just for Oswald for everyone in the Kingdom has forgotten their differences beginning with Lear himself. "[M]easure your lubber's length again" means I'll knock you flat on the ground but, for our purposes, it is perhaps most interesting that he uses a nautical insult and, at least initially, that difference in character in this chapter seems to correspond to how good a sailor you are. (Only notice, Charles and Julia finally commit adultery after falling flat against a bulkhead; their "fall" begins, quite literally, with a fall.)

The lack of respect for differences shows up at the Captain's table the first night out and Waugh, who can rarely resist a dig at Anglicanism, puts foolish words into the mouth of an Episcopalian Bishop who tells Charles that he is on a mission to Barcelona to "reconcile the so-called Anarchists and the so-called Communists". There was, of course, nothing "so-called" about either group: they were very much real Anarchists and real Communists and they were engaged in a death fight like the Bloods and The Crips. A struggle that had the Communists in the role of the Crips: they successfully massacred pretty much all the Anarchists in Italy, Spain and France by 1944. Not that it would have been any better if the Anarchists had won.

But our friend the Bishop cares little about such details as labels and ideologies, he, like Lear, has good intentions and thinks that is enough. When a diplomat's wife at the table asks the Bishop what language he plans to speak in Barcelona he answers:

'The language of Reason and Brotherhood, madam,' and, turning back to me, 'The speech of the coming century is in thoughts and not in words. Do you not agree Mr. Ryder?'

Charles says he does but is probably being ironic. More ironic than he knows for he soon falls victim of his own little fantasy where thoughts matter more than words. He thinks Julia and he can say so much without words.

Anyway, lets look at our three characters in this tragedy.

Celia
If we take everything Charles tells us about Celia at face value we will dislike her but, as I hope is clear by now, we should never take anything Charles says at face value.

One obvious place to look when trying to understand any character in Brideshead is to look up their saint's name. The name "Celia" is a form of Cecilia who is one of the companions of Agnes, which is to say she is  one of a group of virgin martyrs who begins as a real person but about whom all sorts of mythology accrues. And the key bit of mythology regarding Saint Cecilia is that she talks her husband out of sex on her wedding night and forevermore after that. And that, I would humbly suggest, is Charles real complaint against Celia, that she lets him down sexually. Another woman will comment in this chapter that 'Celia's never quite got the orange blossom out of her hair, has she?' (Orange blossoms were traditional in Bridal floral arrangements at the time because the orange blossoms and fruits at the same time. We've lost our taste for that kind of symbolism.) In any case, Charles resents Celia for being something of a perpetual virgin.

We've had two mentions of Celia in the story before and the second of these confirms this thesis. It is made by Mr. Samgrass when he possess everything at Brideshead including the young maidens, his favourite among whom is Celia:

'I shall miss the pretty creatures about the house—particularly one Celia ... She has a bird-like style of conversation, pecking away at the subject in a way I find most engaging, and a school-monitor style of dress which I can only call "saucy". I shall miss her, for I do not go tomorrow.'

(Notice, typical Samgrass, that he will miss her not because she is going but because he is not and will, therefore, be unable to pursue her. Maurice Bowra (the model for Samgrass) upon hearing of a wedding announcement once said, "Nice couple, slept with both of them.")

Anyway, back on topic, here is how Charles describes Celia ten years later:

My wife's softness and English reticence, her very white, small regular teeth, her neat rosy finger nails, her schoolgirl air of innocent mischief and her schoolgirl dress, her modern jewelery, which was made at great expense to give the impression, at a distance, of having been mass produced, her ready, rewarding smile, her deference to me and her zeal in my interests, her motherly heart which made her cable daily to nanny at home—in short, her peculiar charm ....

And we might say, wait a minute, what's peculiar about that? The key to his objection is the schoolgirl air of innocent mischief and to that we can only say, what's wrong with your libido Charles?

The real problem comes out in the sex scene with Celia (and I hope at least some readers are beginning to suspect that it's not just me who keeps coming back to the sex but Waugh himself). Here is how Charles describes "his wife's" (he doesn't like using her name does he?) sexual response:

Then she knew what was wanted. She had neat, hygienic ways for that too, but there was both relief and triumph in her smile of welcome.

And we now know what kind of sex Charles wants from Julia don't we? And we know she delivers. I know, I know, so many readers just don't want to confront this but it's there. If Celia is a perpetual virgin in bed, Waugh gives us lots of hints that Julia is most decidedly not.

Okay, you may be saying, but what about Celia's infidelity? Well the important thing here, it seems to me, is not that Celia actually is so virginal as that Charles sees her that way. Mr. Samgrass sees "saucy" and I suspect he is the better judge here. You've know women whose public sexuality is like that haven't you.

And then there is Caroline. Perhaps Charles suspects or knows something awful here:

'... but frankly I do not remember hearing that your new baby was called Caroline. Why did you call it that?'

The thing about being chivalrous is that if you ever want to be a complete cad, all you have to do is let slip in the tiniest way. That "your baby" and "why did you cal it" are the kind of thing that leaves a mark. Poor Celia has named the baby Caroline to recall Charles and with the hope of giving him a sense of ownership regarding a daughter he doesn't feel is his own.

That name carries two powerful echoes by the way. The first is "Carolingian" meaning "a descendant of Charles". But "Caroline"  also calls to mind Queen Caroline who was so shabbily treated by George IV who complained, probably incorrectly, that she wasn't a virgin—not the least troubled by most emphatically not being one himself—only had sex with her three times during their marriage and then locked her out.

And that sort of hypocrisy is also problem with Charles. When Charles begins to recount his pursuit of Julia he contrasts it with his many other seduction attempts these past ten years. How can he complain about Celia then? Charles is a moral hypocrite plain and simple.

(The other previous mention of Celia is in the prologue by the way. It's in that long bit comparing Charles loss of love for the army with a man's loss of love for his wife "in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife ...." Kermode wonders in the introduction to my edition why this was not cut and the answer is because it is Charles speaking and he tells us something about himself by going on too long about his wife.)

Finally, I think the salient moral fact is that Celia wants to be forgiven and Charles does not want to forgive her.

Julia
Julia is also the name of one of the companions of Agnes. Her legend is that she was sold in slavery and traveled on a ship with her master before being captured by pirates. Unlike our Julia, the legend has her being tortured and crucified but, magically, never violated. This seems more than a coincidence. And while Julia is not actually crucified, she does go through sudden and unexpected suffering after she is swept up by the pirate Charles.

The telling moment, I think, is when Charles compares her to the Mona Lisa and notes that the effects of the years weigh on her:

Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent smile of la Gioconda; the years had been more than 'the sound of lyres and flutes', and had saddened her.

And that little quote there is, in case you didn't recognize him, our old friend Walter Pater.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

What is happening here? It's Charles trying to live out the commitment he made to realism. He no longer sees Julia in terms of art but is, he thinks anyway, seeing her real and direct. He is firmly convinced he is leaving his days as an aesthete behind him.

And we might stop a second and contrast this Charles with his namesake Charles Swann in Proust who can only fall in love when he is able to see Odette in terms of a great work of art.

Charlus Rex
And that brings us to Charles and the vindication of Rex.


For here, in one chapter, Charles does everything he sneered at in Rex.

1. He connects with Celia because she is a woman who gives him access to the world of status and glamour he wants just as Rex did with Brenda Champion. And Celia's importance to Charles success shines through here, She is good at what he wanted and she has been good for him.
2. He dumps this woman when he discovers that he is not happy with what he sought for in her once he has it.
3. He takes Julia like a piece of property.

And the last is plain in the text. Here is how Charles describes his first sex with Julia.

It was no time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with the swallow and the lime flowers. Now on the rough water there was a formality to be observed, no more. It was as though a deed of conveyance to her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.

That is one ugly sentiment and if you don't believe me consider what he was literally entering and that he now describes metaphorically as property. His property!

But, if we are right to be offended, we have no right to be offended on Julia's behalf. There is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that she fails to appreciate how she is being taken nor is there any to indicate that this is anything but exactly what she wants.

A quick hit on Sebastian and Bellini this afternoon and then on to Chapter 2 tomorrow.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Tenebrae

Tenebrae means darkness. It is the name of a service held on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. They still did it pretty much everywhere when I was a kid. Nowadays you really have to look to find a good Tenabrae service.

Anyway, all the candles in the church are extinguished during Tenebrae and, when the church is completely dark, the priests on the altar shuffle their feet on the ground and shake their missals to make us think of the chaos of a world without God. For Catholics, a world without God could only be a world where everything is governed by fluke. And even if it might seem like there are reasons to be moral in such a world it could only be a fluke, a momentary contingency, that there would be a moral aspect of life. Ultimately, it wouldn't make any difference whether life was fair or unfair.

In the beginning was the Word! The word = Logos, that is to say the fact that our life makes sense depends on Jesus existing. And Catholics like me believe that it makes no difference one way or another whether you believe in him on this point: no Jesus, no sense. During Tenebrae we imagine a world in which the word did not come. At the end of the Holy Thursday mass there is no conclusion. People just walk away. The mass is not completed until Easter. It's all one mass with this giant ellipsis in the middle. You might say that from the moment we leave the Holy Thursday until Easter Sunday is a gap in which Richard Dawkins gets to be right.

Anyway, Cordelia mentions a chant from Tenebrae, Quomodo sedet sola civitas. This is interesting for all sorts of reasons. One is that this is one of very few instances, if not the only one, in which music comes off well in Waugh. I have often wondered if Waugh wasn't tone deaf. He refused an invitation from Stravinsky by saying that music meant nothing to him.

It's also relevant because the words give extra depth of what Brideshead Deserted means. (I've cited from Tanakh Translation here.)

Alas!
Lonely sits the city
Once great with people!
She that was great among nations
Is become like a widow;
The princes among states
Is become a thrall.
Bitterly she weeps in the night,
Her cheek wet with tears.
There is none there to comfort her
Of all her friends.
All her allies have betrayed her;
They have become like foes.
Judah has gone into exile
Because of misery and harsh oppression;
When she settled among the nations,
she found no rest;
All her pursuers overtook her

in the narrow places.

This is sung with an antiphon:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn back to the Lord your God.

That "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" can acquire incredible weight when chanted.

The basic text here comes from Lamentations, and the lamenting is actually just warming up here. It keeps getting worse for Jerusalem after this. But we don't have to read it because Anthony Blanche gives us a summary version when talking about Theresa Marchmain's illness:

The Marchioness has been a positive pest ever since I came to London, trying to make me get in touch with them. What a time that poor woman is having! It only shows there's some justice in life.

Okay here is the stunning part: it is very much a, if not the, key message of the Bible that the horrible fate that befalls Jerusalem is entirely deserved. That this suffering is form of love to bring us back to God. In other words, Anthony is right: what happens to Theresa Marchmain here does show us that there is some justice in life. And the question we are left with is whether we want to believe in the punishment only or whether we also want to believe in the possibility of redemption.

The suffering is the easy part. Just step out the door. Even the Buddha could see that part. But an actual, positive redemption—as opposed to the denial of our individuality, like the Buddha proposes—that is harder to believe in.

And, hey, you don't have to if you don't want to.

Anyway, I'm sure you want to hear the chant in question. Here it is:




The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Just an oddly decorated room

The Season of Brideshead
Brideshead Deserted, Chapter 3
An awful lot happens in this chapter and I will have to rein in my desire to try and comment on everything of significance.

The most important thing in the chapter, however, is to note who really has deserted Brideshead. Charles is in France, Sebastian is in Morocco, Bridey, Cordelia and Julia are all at Marchmain House. Lady Marchmain is in her grave at Brideshead. But, if we want to be very realist-minded about it, the only place that is really deserted in this chapter is Marchmain House because it is sold and torn down.

To figure out how Brideshead is really deserted, you have to think like a Catholic and we have the example of Cordelia here describing the de-consecration of the chapel at Brideshead:

After she was buried the priest came in—I was there alone. I don't think he saw me—and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoop and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary, and left the tabernacle open, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room.

The really odd thing is the thing she doesn't say. Because there is one more thing the priest would have done that Cordelia would have also seen but she omits from her recounting.

But let's start from the beginning and build up to that. An altar stone is a specially consecrated stone that was at the time of the story the only place a consecration of the host could take place. It's a very old belief—preceding Catholicism by hundreds of years—that a stone would be a place for a sacred presence. Those who know their Bible may remember that Jacob dreams of his struggles with God while resting his head on a stone and, in the morning, uses that stone to build an altar. Ancient religions all over the place, Japan for example, have long associated special stones with a sacred presence.

This is an important thing to consider when thinking about Catholicism. "Catholic" means universal and the church claims to be the church for everyone—dead, living or not yet born, Catholic or non-Catholic—the Catholic church claims to exist for you.

The oil is used for anointing especially anointing the sick. Holy water is used in blessings. Most important of all: the sanctuary lamp is lit to signify that the real presence of Jesus is in the consecrated hosts.

And that is what Cordelia doesn't mention. There would have been consecrated hosts present in the tabernacle which the priest would have consumed during this ritual. Why doesn't she mention those? Well, it could be that she or Waugh just forgot but I don't think so. I think Cordelia is more aware of the connection with something eternal.

Again let me say that I appreciate that non-Catholics don't believe this and perhaps really don't want to believe it. But, for the sake of understanding the book, it is important to remember that this is a book about Catholics and readers need to understand how Catholics think to get this just as you would need to know something about Buddhists to read a novel about them or Jews to read a novel about them or about secular humanists to read a novel about them, you really need to grasp this point to fully understand Brideshead Revisited.

What concerns Cordelia is not a particular object that is leaving the room but with the connection to what she (and I) consider an eternal sacrifice. For we Catholics believe that the sacrifice that Jesus makes on the cross takes place both inside and outside history. It is an historical event but there is also a sense in which it is always happening. For an individual Catholic to make any sacrifice at all is, therefore, not delayed gratification but a way of connecting to this one perfect sacrifice. We believe that sacrific is its own reward.

Anyway, every time the sacrifice of the mass is performed, it is, for us Catholics, the supreme connection with the eternal and the sacred. That is what Cordelia is talking about. It isn't any particular thing that is gone, it is the ability to make this connection here in this room that is gone. This is the reverse of the discussion about the tortoise and the pyx. The room is just an oddly decorated room once that function is gone.

And that is why she stays there until he is gone and only then is it a just an oddly decorated room. For when God's priest walks out the door this room can no longer perform the function it was built for.

A few odds and ends
The above is what really matters but there are quite a few other things happening and some of them are interesting.

Parallel lives
For example, this parallel between something Boy Mulcaster says here and what Sebastian said back in Venice.

Boy Mulcaster: 'You and I,' he said, 'were too young to have fought in the war. Other chaps fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We'll show them. We'll show the dead chaps we can fight too."

Sebastian: I remember Sebastian looking up at the Colleoni statue and saying: 'It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war.'

Colleoni was a soldier of fortune and the famous statue shows him on horseback. Boy and Sebastian have more in common than we might like to admit. And the name "Boy" does suggest an pre-occupation with youth doesn't it?

Everybody in this novel is a lot like the person we might imagine to be their opposite.

Wish fulfillment
Charles regrets leaving Paris to come help with the national strike.

I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there—for I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a garçonnière in Auteuil—and wished I had not come.

"Emancipated" is a great word isn't it. What can he mean by that? As recently as the 1980s, people used to say that a woman was "liberated" without irony. Nowadays, it's hard to think what is left for a girl to be liberated or emancipated from.

But–being the gross disgusting pig of a boy that the Serpentine One occasionally accuses me of being—I must point out that "garçonnière" (gar-sun-ee-air is a rough approximation of the pronunciation) means bachelor apartment so whatever "concerned with" means it all happens with the three of them in the same room together.

Which leads me to revisit the issue of "wish fulfillment". When Charles goes to Paris we might say there is evidence of wish fulfillment. All his life Waugh regretted that he had not learned to speak or read French well. We might say that surely here Waugh is writing the life he wished he might have lived. And that is true. I think that is exactly what Charles does—he lives the life Waugh might have wanted. BUT we should remember to notice what the consequences of this are. Charles is indeed, somewhat like a Waugh who does exactly what he wants but where does he end up. If anything, the novel is the opposite of wish fulfillment.

Hating God by hating people
There is the memory of the late Theresa Brideshead as recounted by Cordelia:

'Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's all bosh.'

There is, if we're paying attention, about as harsh a condemnation as sweet little Cordelia is capable of in that: "she was saintly but she wasn't a saint". You may think you're being hard on Lady Marchmain but anything you may think is small cheese compared to that. (By the way, notice how  Bridey realizes that Sebastian deserves an allowance, an issue I mentioned earlier. Lady Marchmain would never have allowed such a thing because it was the source of her power to manipulate poor Sebastian.)

But it's the highlighted bit that I think we need to remember. Find something in someone else that is like ourselves and hate that. Keeping in mind what I say about the similarities between Boy and Sebastian above we might keep that in mind.

Simple boobies who love God by loving people
Alternatively, we might find something in someone else that we can love and thereby find reason to see that God loves us. In response to Cordelia's attempt to explain why people hated Lady Marchmain above, Charles says,

'I have heard almost the same thing once before—from someone very different.'

Cordelia doesn't pick up on the hint and ask, "Who was that?" but we should. It was Cara describing how Lord Marchmain feels about Lady Marchmain:

And all for Lady Marchmain. He will not touch a hand that has touched hers. ... He is mad.  And how has she deserved this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up. I have never met Lady Marchmain; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved. I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.

Cara's name is "Cara" after all.

And I'll wrap up with one other good and simple person from this chapter. The monk who takes care of Sebastian at the infirmary:

And he is so kind. There is a poor German boy with a foot that will not heal and secondary syphilis, who comes here for treatment. Lord Flyte found him in Tangier and took him in and gave him a home. A real Samaritan.'

'Poor simple monk,' I thought, 'poor booby.' God forgive me.

Yes, I'm on about the sex and love again because that is what Charles pities the monk for not seeing: the real nature of the relationship between Sebastian and Kurt. But loving the right way, which is Waugh's concern, over and over again, is not primarily about the things we are not supposed to be doing—the stuff high in the catalogue of grave sins—but with the way we are supposed to love; he is concerned with trying to find something in someone else that we can love and thereby find reason to see that God loves us.

The poor booby of a monk passes the test and so does Sebastian the Epicurean.

In no other novel does Waugh lay out his understanding of faith, hope and love quite so fully. Every other thing he wrote has him hiding behind what is dark and what is absurd. Nowhere else do we get to see Waugh quite as naked as we do in Brideshead Revisited.


There will be  quick entry on music later today

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

It is time to speak of Theresa

TThe Season of Brideshead
Brideshead deserted, chapter 2
Because the story about Julia is pretty straightforward without her mother just as the story of Sebastian would be straightforward without his mother.

Let's flash back to the first things that Charles says about Lady Marchmain.

She accepted me as Sebastian's friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.

Looking back from the end of this chapter that doesn't quite seem adequate anymore does it? Charles, unfailingly chivalrous as he always is, says what a gentleman ought to say and no more. Perhaps we should say more.

In this chapter, Rex makes a number of astoundingly crass remarks, the very crassest of which is the following remark in response to being told that a mixed marriage is a low key affair:

'How d'you mean "mixed"? I'm not a nigger or anything.'

And we are shocked, not least because he uses what is for us the only truly unspeakable word anymore. But poor Rex, who has only made the point rhetorically, does not realize that Mady Marchmain has raised it in a literal way:

'We know nothing about him. He may have black blood—in fact he is suspiciously dark. Darling the whole thing's impossible. I can't see how you can have been so foolish.'

And note how little heed she pays to her daughter's thoughts. Theresa Marchmain treats her twenty-year old daughter like a child. Charles and Cordelia try so hard to love Lady Marchmain, as they should, but she is not easy to love.

I had a girlfriend once who treated me very badly. It took me years to forgive her because it took me years to actually blame her for for what she did to me. I kept thinking of ways to excuse or explain away what she had done. It was only when I finally said out loud that it really was her fault that I could begin to forgive her. Lady Marchmain has that effect on us. We need to say out loud what she has done.

We might pause and remember how she tries to deflect responsibility for the suggestion that Sebastian stay with Msgr. Bell away from herself and then compare that with the ruthlessly manipulative way she behaves in this chapter. And, given her remark above, we might wonder whether Bridey is solely responsible for the awful affront of hiring a private detective.

Julia's sin, which I will get to in a moment, is essential to understanding the story but we might wonder if it isn't somewhat forced on her by Lady Marchmain's constantly manipulative behaviour. She tells Julia that she is concerned with her happiness but she doesn't seem to think that Julia herself should have any input into this. In the extreme, we might wonder if Lady Marchmain would be as happy achieving her daughter's happiness through electroshock therapy.

Compare that approach to Lord Marchmain's response:

Lord Marchmain did not concern himself with the finer points of Rex's character; those, he believed, were his daughter's business. Rex seemed a rough, healthy, prosperous fellow whose name was already familiar to him from reading political reports; he gambled in an open-handed but sensible manner; he seemed to keep reasonably good company; he had a future; Lady Marchmain disliked him. 

That is far from sufficient but, on the whole, it's about as much as an absent father might do. It is definitely better than what Lady Marchmain manages. And, in it, we can see powerful hints of why Lord Marchmain left his manipulative wife to begin with. Not enough, in my view, to justify what he does, but there are always some good reasons to sin aren't there?

Julia's sin
In modal logic we might say the reasons to sin are often compelling in that we have necessary but never quite sufficient cause to sin.

Right from the beginning, Julia's pursuit of Rex is a little dubious.

Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of what she and her friends might be in twelve years' time; there was an antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion's property sharpened Julia's appetite for Rex.

By the way, that paragraph makes every bit as much sense if you replace Julia and Brenda with Charles and Rex for there is an antagonism that is otherwise hard to explain and Julia being Rex's property certainly sharpens Charles appetite for her.

But back to the main question: what is Julia's sin? This may elude non-Catholics but that Julia would refuse confession is a big thing. We have had a lot of talk about grave sins and mortal sins but by leaving the confessional the way she does, Julia commits the only certifiable mortal sin in the book. She doesn't just do something wrong or even knowingly do something wrong, she decides that what she wants is more important than maintaining her relationship with God.

Now non-Catholics are maybe thinking now is the time to click away and find some more reasonable and secular approach to the book. I don't blame you but remember, Julia is a Catholic. You may think this is the wrong way to approach these questions but they are the approach she takes.

Waugh, by the way, has embedded the reasoning right in the text when he has Charles comment on Julia's thinking it unfair that her protestant friends can do what they want because their ignorance renders them innocent.

So what makes her do it? Is it sex?

I know, here Jules goes again. Always back to the sex, you'd think I thought of nothing else (and you wouldn't be far wrong some days). But what are we to make of this?

Well, we have some hints.

Rex awakens real passion in Julia and that attracts and frightens her. She has done "things" we have no idea what they are, with "uncertain and sentimental boys"before (and who might they have been?) but she never responded before. Now she has. So even if you think it was just kissing, it was kissing that got her ... well, I don't have to delve into the facts of a woman's physical response to sexual arousal do I?

The second hint we get is that whatever it is that they are doing, it's enough to provide Rex with sufficient compensation to give up what he was getting from Brenda Champion. It is only when Julia puts a stop to it that he returns to his former mistress for, what shall we say, "relief?"

The final hint is that when Charles asks Julia why she told her mother she was Rex's mistress, she says that it is because she sort of believed it. Whatever was happening was pretty intense. And, much as I hate to make poor Charles squirm at the thought, it was intense for Julia.

It's not hard to imagine her situation is it? "Wouldn't it be nice if we were old and married, then we wouldn't have to wait so long," as Brian Wilson said. Except that they both are old. Rex is definitely so and Julia is "old enough".

Okay, let me let all the non-Catholics in on the logic of the thing. Julia could go on committing all sorts of sins. She could go home with those uncertain boys and make things they didn't even have the courage to dream of come true, she could get drunk and get scooped up by an evil man who took her home and photographed her having sex, or she she could have sixteen lesbian love affairs and never once do anything that   would separate her from God so long as she continued to repent for her weaknesses. She might even convince herself that having sex with Rex isn't really a sin and, so long as she really believed what she said she believed, she would be redeemable. But she doesn't do any of that.

What she does do is decide that what she wants is worth more than doing what she believes God wants for her. So she shuts the doors. And my litany of "grave sins" above is not just prurience here. Even though what she and Rex are doing is nothing more than what used to be called "petting" it is the most serious sin in the whole book not because of the actual acts but because of what the act means in the context of Julia's relationship with God.

Okay, but what did they actually do?
Don't be so prurient says Sebastian. In any case, I don't know.

But we should not be like baby boomers here. As some snide critic said back in the 1980s, baby boomers tend to think they were the only people to really have childhoods, loves and become parents. Most of all, baby boomers had and have a hard time imagining that other generations really had sex.

This is all digression from here on down and had nothing to do with Brideshead but I was reading Christian Rossetti the other night and came across a poem I'd never read before called "The Convent Threshold". In it, Rossetti takes on the persona of a young woman who has "sinned a pleasant sin" with a young man and now has decided to enter the convent and wants her lover to accept this choice because:

Lo, stairs are meant to lift us higher:

Mount with me, mount the kindled stair.

It is the night before her entry and he visits and she turns him away. But she has a dream. She has lots of dreams. Here is how she recounts part of what she dreamed:

I tell you what I dreamed last night:

A spirit with transfigured face

Fire-footed clomb with infinite space.

I heard his hundred pinions clang,

Heaven-bells rejoice and clang,

Heaven-air was thrilled with subtle scents

Words spun upon their rushing cars:

He mounted shrieking: 'Give me light.'

Still light was poured on him, more light;

Angels, Archangels he outstripped

Exultant in exceeding might,

And trod the skirts of Cherubim.

Still 'Give me light,' he shrieked; and dipped

His thirsty face, and drank a sea,

Athirst with thirst it could not slake.

There is a nice bit of ambiguity in the last line don't you think? I mean the way the sea itself seems to be just as thirsty as the one drinking. As Charles might say, "What can you mean?

Somewhere along the line, the spiritual goal gets mixed up with the sensual one. But, and this is my main point here, Christina Rossetti, who was as high Anglican as high Anglican gets and never married is rather knowing here. At some point her spirit with transfigured face stops mounting the ladder and does his mounting elsewhere. And when he dips and drinks it is impossible not think of another specific act and dear Christina seems to know exactly what it is like to feel "athirst with thirst" that cannot be slaked. In our crass way we'd say "insatiable".

Anyway, Christina Rossetti also wrote the words to the following so I'll leave you with it.




The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Pressed duck!

The Season of Brideshead
Brideshead Deserted, Chapter 1
Now that meal. I've separated it out from the rest of chapter 1 because it is the turning point in the novel. It's all Sebastian up until Rex and Charles eat together and it's all Julia afterward.

And here is where I make enemies of some readers. A lot of people—I was one of them the first few times I read the book—take everything Charles tells us about this meal and about Rex at face value. We want Charles to be right and everyone else, especially Rex, to be wrong. It is a tribute to Waugh's genius that we do feel that way—that is the way he wants us to react. But he also expects us to be intelligent enough to recognize that there are problems with Charles' story. Remember that he is the sickly child and it is up to us to figure out what is wrong with him.

This meal offers us some powerful hints because Charles is both threatened and jealous of Rex and that effects how he presents the story.

The most blatant example of this is the way Charles presents Rex's tastes as flamboyant and even crass and, by implication, Charles' own tastes as subtle and refined.

Except that he orders pressed duck! A pressed duck is a very special item. It requires a specially slaughtered bird which is still in its blood that that is then partially cooked. This bird is brought from the kitchen and the final preparation is done in front of the diners. It is pressed in a mechanical device that pushes the juices out and these are cooked along with the meat. This is one very ostentatious choice.

As he recounts the meal, Charles mocks Rex for the kinds of things he hears—about death and bankruptcy—and yet he wraps the tale up with a bit of gossip of his own about how the wedding didn't some off as Rex had planned. It's the sort of thing Charles hears.

And for all his insistence that he doesn't want to hear about what Rex has to say about himself and what he is doing, what Charles really doesn't want to hear about is Rex and Julia. Even recounting it all these years later, he doesn't want to do anymore than cite disjointed phrases.

Julia has been slowly looming up in the story and she will explode, fully blossomed in the next chapter. We know that Charles is sexually attracted to her. But he doesn't seem to really want her until she is linked to someone else. This is very Proustian. In Proust, people fall in love and stay in love driven by jealousy and insecurity. As we see read about how Julia falls in love with Rex over the next few paragraphs and then of how Charles falls in love with her, we might keep this in mind. How much of this relationship is driven by jealousy and insecurity? And  we might reconsider, in retrospect, how important this jealousy and insecurity was to Charles falling in love with Sebastian.

Finally, for I will be brief-ish today, let's consider two criticisms that Charles directs towards Rex, two sneers really.

The first concerns Brenda Champion. Charles says that Rex owes his place in the world to Brenda Champion. She is the one who got him access to society. And he further says that once she was no longer of any use to him, Rex loses interest in her.

The second thing Charles says of Rex is that he sets about acquiring Julia as if she were a bit of real property he was trying to get the best deal for.

Keep those two things in mind and see if they might apply to anyone else as the story goes along.

By the way: I will be posting on Brideshead tomorrow.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Sir William Beveridge

Sir William Beveridge wrote the Beveridge report which set up the basis for establishing a welfare state in Great Britain. At the time the report was issued, he and Evelyn Waugh met. The Earl of Longford, who was also present,  recorded this exchange for posterity:

 Later that day or the next day I asked him to come to lunch. I was meeting with Evelyn Waugh, an old friend and famous writer. They did not get on at all well. Evelyn Waugh said to him at the end, "How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?" He paused and said, "I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it". Evelyn Waugh said, "I get mine spreading alarm and despondency"--this was in the height of the war--"and I get more satisfaction than you do".

Waugh was playing it up a bit here but he has a point. There is something deeply wrong with any person who says they get their pleasure trying to make the world a better place. A good spit in the eye was just what was called for. Thank God for Evelyn Waugh.

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.