Catholic Fiction

reviewed by Rachel Murphy

I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green…

—from William Blake’s Songs of Experience

When I first attempted to read Brideshead Revistited, I confess that I put it aside rather quickly. Charles Ryder, from whose perspective the story is told, is not easy to warm up to; his cold, jaded view of the army—of life itself, for he had fallen “out of love” with both—imparts a deadness, like a stale air, to the opening pages.  What I did not yet realize is that the reader need not fall in love with Charles to fall in love with the story; and that nothing in the atmosphere is accidental. 

A second difficulty, for me, in becoming engaged in the story was a certain detachment from the setting. Even when there is some warmth, some flicker of vitality struck by the spark of Charles’ memory—for most of the book is a flashback—it was of a world that seemed entirely foreign—or, rather, unattractive—whether the setting was Brideshead Manor, or Oxford.  Here for me was not the Oxford of romance—of Tolkien, Lewis and the Inklings, of books and pubs; nor the Oxford of Newman, whose “dreaming spires” and cloistered walks breathed the ferocious and ascetic energy of the Oxford Movement, that  gentle but crystalline voice perhaps still echoing from the pulpit at St. Mary’s in the grey evening twilight.  No; Ryder’s world, and particularly the world that he finds himself thrown into and dazzled by, is that of the wealthy set, aristocratic and titled; a set whose idea of contentment does not consis of long walks and spirited discussions, the energy of autumn at the beginning of Term, but of “languid” spells of wine and strawberries on hot summer days, of listlessness and of drinking oneself into oblivion.

When a friend told me, however, that Brideshead Revisited was "the book of the twentieth century", I had to give it another chance. And, indeed, I found myself not only going back to the book, and finishing it, but listening (twice) to the audiobook read beautifully by Jeremy Irons. Something about the novel was singularly haunting, though subtle and almost indefinable, and in particular the lovable but sad and elusive character of Lord Sebastian Flyte, one of the most beautiful of literary creations.  

It is not, for me, the book of the century, but it is certainly one of them. In the same space of time, I watched with delight the nearly flawless BBC miniseries, starring such actors as Irons (Ryder), Laurence Olivier (Lord Marchmain), Claire Bloom (Lady Marchmain) and, most notably, Anthony Andrews as Sebastian. The secondary character performances, too, are flawless: John Gielgud’s marvelously dry, quirky turn as Ryder’s father, and the unforgettably "flaming" performance of Nickolas Grace as Anthony Blanche.  

What is it about this strange little book, this melancholy little human drama, that has the power of remaining with the reader long afterwards?  Perhaps that it is not merely a “human drama.”  

The novel’s first line is unassuming enough: “When I reached Company C lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.”  But just as the whole story, for Ryder, is one of pausing, of looking back in order that what has long been hidden over time—from happy careless years, to languid years, to dead years—might be woven together and understood, so too must the reader pause and look back at the story before things begin to take shape through the mists.          

The first real spark we detect in Ryder is when the second-in-command mentions the name of the abandoned mansion where the army is to set-up camp: Brideshead. “On the instant,” Ryder reflects, “it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears…for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed…”  He goes on to narrate to the reader why this place holds such memory for him, and we come to realize that this story is not necessarily about Charles Ryder at all; while at the same time he is expressing what the story is about—in a passive way, as though he too, like us, is a reader caught up in a story not his own, and yet might be changed by it.  

Ryder recalls that as an Oxford undergraduate he had found himself, by “an unpropitious meeting,” befriending a fellow student of questionable character and of lofty birth:  

I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable for, from his
first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was
arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour which seemed to know no bounds. 

Sebastian is known for his drinking, his shady friends, and for carrying around a teddy bear named Aloysius. He is loved by fellow students because of his “charm”; but is also belittled and misunderstood. He is basically written off as a flake, though a very charming flake.

As the friendship between Sebastian and Charles develops, Charles becomes aware of an unnatural reluctance in Sebastian to allow him access into his more private life, particularly regarding his family—a family that is colorfully described by the more colorful Anthony Blanche as “gruesome.” The acquaintance is unavoidable, however, and Charles becomes intimately involved with the members of the Marchmain family: pious, controlling Lady Marchmain, Sebastian’s mother; the absent father who long ago ran out on the family and is keeping a mistress in a villa in Italy because of his hatred for his wife; the comically dry but faithful Lord Brideshead (nicknamed “Bridey”), the eldest son; the flippant and irreligious debutante sister Julia, longing for prestige and a good marriage; and the youngest child, Cordelia, a simple and honest girl who is in some ways the wisest character in the novel. They are a dysfunctional Catholic family in an Anglican world. Charles, an agnostic, becomes a bit dazzled by the mystique of this wealthy and strange family, and is irreversibly drawn into its circle.

The intimacy with the Marchmains comes at a heavy price, however—Charles’ gradual and indefinable estrangement from Sebastian. A mysterious threat lays heavy upon the seemingly carefree young lord, a threat from a family that he both loves and fears. “He was,” Charles laments, “sick at heart somewhere, I did not know how, and I grieved for him, unable to help.” Drinking more and more heavily and more frequently, Sebastian, a young man still “in love with his own childhood,” finally seeks to escape the world and all of those who, in his mind, threaten his happiness and freedom.  “His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone…And since Sebastian counted among the intruders his own conscience and all claims of human affection, his days in Arcadia were numbered.”  

It is a curious move of Waugh’s to allow a character as intriguing as Sebastian to seemingly leave the story so quickly. (I say “seemingly” because each reader may judge how much a part he continues to play in absentia.) But in this novel more than most, what is not said is often as important as what is. And Brideshead is nothing if not permeated by a longing for something that is past, gone, elusive; a paradise lost, which might yet be regained, though with difficulty.

It is the agnostic Charles who expresses this need in a singular way later in the novel, after he has become an architectural painter (particularly of houses that are soon to be sold or razed, so that his “arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of
the auctioneers, a presage of doom”):

But as the years passed I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain House and once or twice since, the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by hand—in a word, the inspiration.

Waugh’s prose is unparalleled in its crystalline simplicity and evocative poetry. Its refined quality gives the writing a subtlety that makes it all too easy sometimes to pass over much that is vitally important to understanding the complex characters. Brideshead lends itself well to multiple readings, even if certain sequences—I am thinking in particular of the Charles-Julia sequence aboard ship—wear a little thin over time. The characters are finely and beautifully drawn; and each in their words sheds light on the others. It must must certainly be argued that every line either spoken by or about Sebastian is like a delicate tile in a complex mosaic: one must put them all together to have any just understanding of him—some understanding of why it is that he feels haunted and hunted, down the nights and down the days (Francis Thompson). 

There are unforgettably wonderful comic moments to lighten the heaviness, too—notably Rex Mottram’s catechesis in Chapter Seven. Waugh never blinks at the idiosyncrasies—even outright hypocrisies—of individual members of the Church of Rome, and yet no novel is more thoroughly Catholic than this. Catholicism is the ever-present theme—and atmosphere, and identity, and mystery—of this world. Faith is the double-edged sword, the stumbling-block, the life and death, the fear and desire, of the novel’s main characters. Nor does Waugh seem to claim that Catholics are, humanly-speaking, any happier than anyone else. Indeed, most of the main characters are in some degree miserable and desperate for happiness. As St. Augustine says better than anyone, “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”  

Moreover, human conceptions of sanctity (e.g. Lady Marchmain) may not be, just perhaps, God’s conception of it; might a depressive dipsomaniac, ever struggling, who has lost much power of will, actually be “very near and dear to God”?

Brideshead Revisited offers a quietly powerful reflection on faith, on holiness, on modernity, and on the timeless pursuit of happiness, which might be better termed “peace”.  "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” says Christ. “Not as the world gives do I give it to you.”  (John 14:27) For that mysterious Chapel that Blake speaks of in the poem, built upon the playground of childhood, has perhaps, unseen and unsuspected, been there all along, whether we see it or not, like it or not. And its foundation reaches below the green earth; its flame burns into the night for those who have gone far, and yet cannot wholly turn away.