Not about Teddy Bears and Plovers' Eggs - Brideshead Revisited Revisited

In the belief that Budgets are always misrepresented by their authors, and misunderstood by the experts on the day they come out, I offer a small diversion here, about Evelyn Waugh’s novel ‘Brideshead Revisited’ . We’ll find out what George Osborne really meant when the clever boys and girls have scanned the Treasury Red Book properly, round about Friday. Depend upon it, the early verdicts aren’t worth the bother.

 

My Brideshead diversion came about because I felt a little drained on Sunday.  I had gone, in the snow, to debate against Sir Simon Jenkins on the subject of drugs, for the Oxford Literary Festival. As usual in such debates, the experience was like hacking at a fogbank with a cutlass, as the English middle classes have for the most part been completely brainwashed on this subject. They wrongly think they know what is going on, when in fact they have no idea at all and are usually 180 degrees in the wrong,  and it is all one can do to get them to think about it at all. But by then, time is up.

 

I pointed out to a reasonably large audience in the splendid Sheldonian Theatre (which with its neighbour the Clarendon Building pretty much solidifies the Anglican settlement in stone) that my book ‘The War We Never Fought’ had been more or less buried in silence by the book review pages of almost every major newspaper or other book-reviewing publication, despite being written in clear English by a reasonably well-known person, on an interesting and topical subject,  attractively designed and published by a large and reputable publisher, sent in advance to a long list of influential commentators and ably publicised by one of the most skilful publicists in the business. Had I written, say, about the urgent and central matter of male prostitutes in Victorian London I would have been reviewed all over the place. Except that, since it would have been me writing about them, I wouldn’t have been, if you see what I mean.

 

I did take advantage of our debate to tell Sir Simon that it was about time he actually responded to my book  in print, as it was squarely and explicitly aimed at him and his many articles on the subject. I wonder if he will. The thing is that he is so right about so many other things that this mistaken position on this subject is particularly important.

 

Anyway, virtue goes out of you on such occasions, and I hoped to gain solace by walking home, but my rhythm was disturbed when I found that my chosen route was (for what I think is the fifth time this winter) flooded . Rather than go back and traipse round by the long way, I rolled up my trousers, took off my shoes and socks and waded through the icy water, which required too much concentration to be relaxing.

 

By the time I eventually got home, I was in the mood for total, selfish escape from the day. So I pulled from the shelf my old, slightly foxed edition of ‘Brideshead Revisited’  by Evelyn Waugh, a school prize given to me for general knowledge (ha!) in the summer of 1966 when I was not yet 15. It’s under the imprint of Chapman and Hall, and, while beautifully printed in England on good paper, has more typographical errors than even this blog, and (ha! again) at least one misplaced apostrophe.  By the way, I’m not as militant about apostrophes as some people, because it’s not possible to be, logically.  While I loathe the way councils leave them off street signs, I have to admit they’re confusing, and not as rigidly unchanging as we might like to think. In my ancient edition of ‘Alice in Wonderland, the word ‘shan’t’ is repeatedly written ‘sha’n’t’, which was no doubt correct at the time and actually makes perfect sense when you think about it.  But if anyone did that now, they’d be reported to Keith Waterhouse’s Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe (AAAA).  Where did that extra apostrophe go, and when? I’d guess it went sometime between 1914 and 1918.

 

German, which (much like English) uses a terminal ‘s’ to signify possession, doesn’t bother with the apostrophe at all, as far as I know. Though I think Dutch does.

 

But I digress. How much I understood the book the first or second time I read it, I can’t now be sure. I was in a sort of smog of misunderstanding when I read books in adolescence, but of course I didn’t know it at the time. Not realising that you don’t understand what’s going on, you may miss the point of whole, huge passages. Yet others, thinks to the sheer power of the writing, or because they are funny and truthful, get into the mind and stay there. I have always remembered the cruel sneer against Anglo-Catholics, always remembered the young lady with the moustache and the big feet who attends the sublimely awful dinner, always remembered Charles Ryder’s father and his feline, cunning methods of domestic warfare, always remembered the bat’s squeak of unexpressed desire when Charles Ryder first meets Julia Flyte. I’ve always laughed out loud at Sebastian Flyte’s unexpected mimicry of his horrible, lisping German boyfriend, always loved the (two) moments in the book where Charles Ryder finds himself in the dining car of an express bound from Paddington to the magic parkland of the softest, most wistful part of the English countryside, where it is forever cool and green and peaceful, and more often than not, towards the later stages of summer twilight.

 

I’ve also always enjoyed the description of the hero’s night in the cells after a drunken incident with a car, and the relentless, savage demolition of the character called Rex Mottram, who is supposed to be based on Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s unloveliest crony, but who is really just a modern version of John Bunyan’s Mr Worldly Wiseman, a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and who simply has not developed as a complete human being. The descriptions of the Atlantic crossing in a storm, during which Charles embarks on the adulterous relationship which seems to be the culmination of the story and isn’t,  also seem to me to capture many, many potent emotions with supreme skill. They also convey something of the strange, out-of-the-world sensation which I have myself felt during two Atlantic crossings (one rough, one not).

 

And I have never forgotten the moment when Lord Marchmain gestures to the hideous, grotesquely ornate bed which he has compelled his servants to assemble on his return from long exile, and says to Charles (now a painter by trade) ‘You might paint that. You could call it “The Death Bed”’, and it is like a great bell tolling.

 

I also remember, pestilential atheist as I then was, furiously objecting to the central scene in which Lord Marchmain returns to the Roman Catholic faith on that death bed. Now an equally pestilential Protestant, I have slightly different views on  the matter.

 

So, having become familiar with the book in my teens, and re-read it perhaps three or four times between 1966 and 1980, I was always slightly puzzled by the way in which ‘Brideshead’ came to be associated (through the 1981-2 TV series) with silly undergraduate excesses in 1920s Oxford, Teddy Bears , plovers’ eggs and foppery . These scenes are in the book, but they are not its point. Waugh himself seems to have been a pretty unbearable and perhaps epicene young man, and was by many accounts a fairly unbearable old man (his own account, that fine book  ‘The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold’,   suggests that he knew perfectly well how horrible he was, but enjoyed it too much to stop).

 

But the book is not about silly students. It is about love, friendship and God’s grace, and also about the author’s own reflection( after saying he now planned to live in a  world of three dimensions, using his own five senses) that ‘I have since learned that there is no such world’ – a statement which has haunted me since the first time I read it , has troubled me ever since and which I think I now more or less understand ( see my recent posting on Chartres and its cathedral).

 

The TV series is actually quite good,  as the eventual script (not the one by John Mortimer, which was not used) more or less followed the book, pretty much word for word. I’m not sure if Castle Howard was quite right as ‘Brideshead’ but it was near enough, and the casting, while sometimes a bit off, was also sometimes close to genius, all smoothed over by Geoffrey Burgon’s more or less perfect music.  You can see, if you can bear to watch the more recent cinema version, how badly the same thing could have been done in other hands.  

 

But it can’t avoid the honeyed shots of Oxford and of the great house, and so doesn’t (in my view) quite have the more masculine, shadowy power of the book.  Waugh, as far as I am concerned, was a genuinely great writer who sometimes hid that genius in the middle of laughter, so making people ignore or forget (or not notice) the genius. Several moments in ‘Brideshead’ seem to me to go well beyond the ordinary, the competent or the merely good - the early scene when, as Charles once more hears the name of ‘Brideshead’  a ghastly shouting voice seems suddenly to have been switched off, the description of Sebastian’s desperate drunkenness as a blow falling repeatedly on a bruise, and the extraordinarily bitter segment where the chivalrous, self-sacrificial Christian young men who were killed in the First World War are said to have died   "  ... so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures". There’s also a disturbing passage in which Sebastian’s drinking, and everyone’s desire to keep from full knowledge of it,  is compared to a fire at sea, black and red far below decks, occasionally bursting out in sudden wafts of smoke, and an unforgettable characterisation of the General Strike, as being like a fabled beast which emerges briefly from its lair only to sniff the air and return unbloodied to its cave.  I am myself very fond of the description of the strange dinner which Charles shares with Rex Mottram at the stately, unfashionable Restaurant Paillard in Paris, where the ancient beauty, craft, dedication, joy and tradition expressed by the wine (an old Burgundy) is contrasted with Rex’s modern vulgarity and crassness. I think I know exactly what he means.   

 

Having pulled the book out of the shelf on Sunday, I could not rest until I had once again read it to the end (in the course of doing so finding three or four small details which I had previously failed to notice). Forget the blasted Teddy Bear. This is a real book of great power.