On (mis)reading Brideshead Revisited
Note: This post contains spoilers.
I’ve belonged to various book clubs over the years, but I’ve generally fallen away after being asked to read a few things I didn’t enjoy. Well Read Moms is refreshingly different. There’s a yearly theme and a guide, and I love the idea that spiritual book clubs all over the country are reading in tandem together. Our own group developed organically out of a few years of parish-based Lenten group study, so last summer, I was really excited to discuss Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas with some of my dearest spiritual friends. And we all loved Marly Youmans’s Charis in the World of Wonders. But I must confess that, despite the excellent commentaries that were provided for us, we struggled a bit with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. (This did, however, create an opportunity for one of us to study up and give an excellent tutorial on the poems–and she wasn’t even an English major in college!)
And now, we come to the great Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited has long been a favorite of mine, but I’m having some trouble with the ending. My idiosyncratic reading of Brideshead is probably formed by at least two other great books: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s characters grapple with church teaching on marriage and sexuality just as Waugh’s do. And in an amazing coincidence (but is it coincidence, really?) Hardy’s counterpart to Waugh’s Julia Flyte is named Sue Bridehead!
But more on that later. The influence of Swann’s Way has to do, of course, with the taste of the madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea (suffice it to say that, in Proust, any episode of involuntary memory is a good thing). As Aunt Leonie’s house rises up like a stage set around the narrator of Swann’s Way–bringing with it the rooftops and church bells and cobblestone streets of Combray, where the narrator spent much of his childhood–so too rises Brideshead Castle for me as Charles and Sebastian round the bend in Hardcastle’s borrowed car. For me, the house carries all the attractions of nostalgia, and at first, the Brideshead of Charles’s past appears to stand in for the good, the true, and the beautiful–for those youthful interwar years when Charles, wearied now by his pointlessly bureaucratic military life, was discovering friendship at Oxford. This, of course, is a misreading of Brideshead, though perhaps one that Waugh might permit for the earliest pages. It is only after the house is disrupted by war, becoming a place for soldiers to billet—only after Lord Marchmain has died, and the chapel is restored—that Life comes back to the house.
Near the end, the coming war presses hard on the story’s main characters. It is the war that brings Lord Marchmain home from Italy to die, just in time to ruin everything not only for Charles and Julia, but for Bridey and Beryl. Lord Marchmain demands that the “queen’s bed” be brought down for him piece by piece and reassembled in the Chinese parlor; he disparages Beryl and threatens to write Bridey out of the will; and at first, he dismisses the priest who comes to offer the last sacraments. The war presses on Julia, too, hurrying her along the path of divorce and remarriage that will ultimately separate her from Charles. And, finally, it is the war, and Charles’s rather pointless role in it, that makes him world-weary and sad. Frankly, until the last two sentences, Charles doesn’t sound at all like a man who has discovered the spiritual life.
I know I ought to rejoice when Lord Marchmain finally makes the sign of the cross on his deathbed. And I do rejoice–though probably not as much as I should–when Julia finally stops fending off the Hound of Heaven who has so graciously separated her from her sin. And I’m happy for Charles at the end of the book as he kneels before the tabernacle in the chapel, where the Eucharist has been restored. (I feel sure that the shell-shocked old priest who reopens the chapel at Brideshead is a stand-in for Sebastian, who is living out his days as an alcoholic eccentric in a Tunisian monastery.)
In other words, I know that the book ends in grace. But that’s not how I feel. Instead, I feel like something terrible and tragic has happened. When Julia renounces Charles, who says he hopes that her heart will break, I’m completely on his side. I find myself asking, why can’t she get an annulment? After all, her marriage to Rex took place outside the Catholic church, and Rex had been married before. As for Charles–well, if either party entered into Charles’s first marriage without proper intent, it was probably him. Oh, never mind. I just want things to work out! I want consolation in the form of a happier ending; perhaps I ought to try harder to accept desolation instead. But it just seems to me that the “severe mercy” of Sheldon Vanauken’s novel of grief is pretty severe in Brideshead. It’s a severe mercy indeed for Charles to know that Julia lives, and that she has turned away from him for the good of them both.
And if Charles is going to believe and convert, shouldn’t there be more joy in it for him? Instead, the war comes, and the house is ruined, and Julia and Cordelia both enter into a hard, bleak life. And yes, Charles has had the advantage of years to get over the fresh wound of losing Julia. The book’s very last sentence– “You’re looking cheerful today!” –briefly gestures at joy. But I took very seriously the bleak opening in the prologue about the age of Hooper and Charles’s lack of real purpose; I took seriously Charles’s lament that at thirty-nine, he began to be old. A ruined Brideshead with a restored chapel is a beautiful thing, I know. But I still cherish that nostalgic vision that opens the book–especially after the war requisitions the house and makes it quite certain that Charles and Julia will run out of time.
Cathartic, isn’t it? Maybe my reading (I do believe; help my unbelief!) isn’t so far off after all. I’ll have more to say about Thomas Hardy next month.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 