by Paula Byrne
‘General View: It is the Lygons’ was the other side of the coin. Despite his protestations to Coote in Bari that it isn’t really Boom or Hughie, or Mad, and despite the prefatory author’s disclaimer, the Lygons suffuse the book. The portrayal of their ancestral home with its Arts and Crafts chapel, their painful domestic situation, their startling beauty (like faces carved out of Aztec stone), the father as a disgraced Liberal politician who is now a social pariah exiled in Italy, the young people left to run wild in the great house, the pious mother, the alcoholic second son drifting from failure to failure, the lovely daughter who becomes a society beauty in an unhappy marriage, the cold and pompous heir to Brideshead unable to produce an heir himself, the plain and tender-hearted youngest daughter. The Lygons inspired all of these elements and more.
In his war trilogy, Evelyn satirises Brideshead Revisited by having one of his characters, Corporal Ludovic, spend his war writing an impossibly baroque novel that is described as ‘a very gorgeous, almost gaudy, tale of romance and high drama … The plot was Shakespearian in its elaborate improbability. The dialogue could not have issued from human lips, the scenes of passion were capable of bringing a blush to readers of either sex and any age … [it was a book] which could turn from the drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past transformed and illuminated by disordered memory and imagination.’ But the extra joke here, as he pokes fun at his own novel’s perceived weaknesses, is that the elaborately improbable Shakespearean plot of Brideshead was a watered-down version of the real Lygon story. How much more improbable the plot would have been if Evelyn had retained the homosexual element instead of inventing the more socially acceptable figure of Lord Marchmain’s exotic mistress, Cara.
Nancy Mitford, who loved the book, wondered how all the glamorous Flytes could fall in love with such a ‘dim’ character as Charles Ryder. Evelyn half agreed: ‘Yes, I can see how you think Charles is dim, but then he’s telling the story.’ He was telling his own story and he knew that the Lygons had indeed fallen in love with him, as he had with them.
Charles has two love affairs, first with Oxford/Sebastian, and later with Brideshead/Julia. For many of his readers the first is much the more convincing. Evelyn sensed this himself, anxiously asking Nancy: ‘The crucial question is: does Julia’s love for [Charles] seem real or is he so dim that it falls flat; if the latter the book fails plainly.’
The problem is Julia, who, as Waugh’s first biographer Christopher Sykes says, is ‘dead as mutton’. Sykes believed that this was because Julia did not have a real life model; she was no more than a waxwork. The reality is a little more complicated: she did have a partial model in Maimie, but Evelyn’s difficulty was that his platonic and playful relationship with her did not have the dramatic and emotional potency to match his translation of Boom and Hugh into Lord Marchmain and Sebastian.
Oxford Revisited
Beware of the Anglo-Catholics – they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.
(Cousin Jasper’s advice on going up to Oxford)
The Oxford part is especially haunting and beautifully written, to such an extent that Evelyn worried (to Nancy) that he had kept lapsing into verse. As befits the title of Book One, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, these chapters are suffused with a glow of sunlight on grey-golden stone, flowering chestnuts, young men on bicycles, light falling over the spires, grassy meadows, dappled streams, men in cricket whites, green spaces, punting and strawberries. Small wonder that many readers love the Oxford part of the novel best. Maurice Bowra, the quintessential don, thought the Oxford part ‘perfect’, while Harold Acton, Roger Fulford and Christopher Sykes loved the first third of the novel and thought that there was a falling off once Sebastian has left the story. Acton said that the Oxford part of the novel was ‘the most successful evocation of the period I know’.
It is a testimony to how much Evelyn was loved by his friends that so few took offence when he used them as copy for his novels. Harold Acton loyally defended the novel’s brilliance in public, but privately was hurt by Evelyn’s depiction of him in the sinister Anthony Blanche. Evelyn had hoped to get round the problem by combining the characters of Brian Howard and Harold Acton, a neat device since the two men who revolutionised Oxford in the twenties were so close as to be indistinguishable in the eyes of their friends – or at least their enemies. Evelyn told his friends that Blanche was one-third Acton and two-thirds Howard. He recognised that people mistakenly assumed the character was pure Harold (‘who is a much sweeter and saner man’).
Acton hid his hurt feelings when he wrote to congratulate Evelyn: ‘I slid my paper knife through … [the pages] like an itching bridegroom, and was panting, trembling and exhausted by the time I had finished cutting them … swept alternatively by pleasure and pain: pleasure at your ever-increasing virtuosity and mastery of our fast-evaporating language … pain, at the acrid memories of so many old friends you have conjured.’ Anthony Blanche himself could not have put it better.
Despite Evelyn’s assurances to Harold that the bulk (and, by implication, especially the malicious aspects) of Blanche was Howard, there are many Acton hallmarks, most famously the recitation of Eliot’s The Waste Land through a megaphone from the balcony of his rooms in Christ Church (the chosen passage being ‘I Tiresias …’, a specific allusion to bisexuality). The attempt to break into Blanche’s rooms to duck him in the Mercury fountain is based on the same incident with Harold. Most of Evelyn’s friends made the identification when they received their copies of the book. Christopher Sykes claimed that Evelyn used the very same phrases that Acton used, and portrayed him ‘as the ruling aesthete’.
Anthony Blanche even has Harold’s distinctive gait, ‘moving as though he had not fully accustomed himself to coat and trousers and was more at ease in heavy, embroidered robes’. Evelyn removed this description from later editions of the novel, as it was too much like Harold. After Brian’s death he strengthened the identification with him by adding some extra Howardesque descriptions, no doubt to make amends to Harold. The stammer and the turns of speech, the repetition of ‘my dear’, are Brian, as are Blanche’s half Jewish, half American origins, his elegance and his malevolence: ‘waxing in wickedness like a Hogarthian page boy … he dined with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev … he had aroused three irreconcilable feuds in Capri; he had practised black art in Cefalu; he had been cured of drug-taking in California and of an Oedipus complex in Vienna.’
It was the smaller roles that were the harshest. Privately, Evelyn admitted to Christopher Sykes that Rex Mottram was an unkind caricature of the Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken, the man who gave him leave to write Brideshead. Maurice Bowra was secretly annoyed at his portrayal as the toadying don, Mr Samgrass, but he put on a different face in public, saying to his friends: ‘I hope you spotted me. What a piece of artistry that is – the best thing in the whole book.’ The role of Samgrass may have been partly inspired by the Lygons’ habit of bringing tutors of various kinds down to Mad in order to keep an eye on Hugh.
Brideshead is, along with The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the most autobiographical of Waugh’s novels. The plot manifestly mirrors Evelyn’s own experiences as a young man, especially in the Oxford chapters: a lonely middle-class boy goes to Oxford and languishes in the company of dull but clever friends until he is befriended by a group of glamorous Old Etonians who introduce him to an enchanting world of cosmopolitan culture, heavy drinking, beautiful clothes, friendship, stimulating conversation and a childhood that he has missed out on. In terms of his sentimental education, it is not examinations and prizes that he takes with him or academic learning that Oxford bequeaths. Rather, ‘that other, more ancient lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour’.
And yet the Oxford section, so heavily autobiographical, owes a huge literary debt to Book Three, ‘Dreaming Spires’, of Compton Mackenzie’s Edwardian novel, Sinister Street (mentione
d by Waugh in both Brideshead and his autobiography as one of the Oxford novels that most influenced him). There are many parallels between Charles Ryder and Mackenzie’s equally autobiographical hero, Michael Fane, a middle-class boy from a day school who loves art and is taken up by glamorous Etonians. His possessions and artwork are ‘jejune’ (the very word used of Charles’s); he loves the grey and gold of the city, the ‘golden fume of the October weather’. Fane thinks that Oxford should be approached with a stainless curiosity: ‘Already he felt that she would only yield her secret in return for absolute surrender. This the grave city demanded.’ These parallels point towards one aspect of the peculiar power of Brideshead: it is at once autobiographical and archetypal, both the portrait of an age and a book that speaks to the aspirations of youth in other ages.
‘Sebastian gives me many pangs’
‘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.’
(Brideshead Revisited)
In the Hollywood memo, Evelyn described his hero Charles Ryder as an ‘intelligent, artistic and lonely young man’. Lord Sebastian Flyte, meanwhile, ‘is the attractive, wayward and helpless younger son … the idol of the fashionable aesthetic set that was prominent in English university life in the 1920s’.
Sebastian is the most intriguing and lovable character in Brideshead Revisited, and perhaps this is why so many critics have tried to find his model. Though Evelyn went to great pains to reassure Coote that the younger son was not really Hugh, they both knew that their friends would make the connection. Coote insisted rightly that Waugh’s characters were composites, ‘transmuted by his imagination and his considerable powers of invention’. She thought that the interesting thing about the way that people were always intrigued to know who his characters ‘really are’ was that it showed he had succeeded in creating ‘entirely credible people in plausible situations’.
And yet Coote’s response, ‘Sebastian gives me many pangs’, is quietly unequivocal. Christopher Sykes said that in conversation Evelyn told him that he drew upon aspects of Hugh for Sebastian. Maimie told Waugh’s second biographer, Martin Stannard, that Hugh might have suggested Sebastian Flyte as ‘a younger son … under the shadow of not having an inheritance’. Her younger sister confirmed the parallel of the second son. Coote said that Sebastian was based on ‘all the younger sons rolled into one – Hughie, Charlie Cavendish, John Fox Strangeways – characters who all lost out a little because the older sons had everything’. Unsurprisingly, all those mentioned had drink problems.
Evelyn’s friends – Peter Quennell, Terence Greenidge, Somerset Maugham and many more – saw Hugh Lygon as the model for Sebastian Flyte. But he also drew upon his love affairs with Alastair Graham and Richard Pares. On occasions the name Alastair appears in the manuscript for Sebastian. The key to Evelyn’s art was the combination of two characters. His deep feelings for Alastair are woven into the book. However, a closer look reveals that Hugh is much the more important of the two principal models for the incomparable Sebastian. In 1955 Evelyn responded to a letter about Brideshead from a Mr Gadd: ‘I am glad you find ‘‘Sebastian’’ an interesting character. I don’t think he had any egotism. He was a contemplative without the necessary grace of fortitude.’ These words could have been applied to Hugh Lygon, but not to Alastair Graham, who was no contemplative and did have a good deal of egotism. More obviously, the character’s aristocratic glamour and sweet nature are wholly Hugh Lygon’s.
At Oxford he is ‘the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty’. His lovely complexion is admired by Anthony Blanche. Whilst the other Etonian teenage boys have spots, Sebastian’s skin remains clear – or at least very nearly so (Blanche spitefully calls him ‘Narcissus with one pustule’). Nanny also notices that he always looks as if his face is washed even when it isn’t. For Charles, he has a face ‘alive and alight with gaiety’. With his outer beauty goes an inner purity.
Among Waugh’s many revisions of the text of Brideshead is a change from ‘he was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality’, to ‘he was entrancing with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind’. There was something about this type of beauty that brought out Evelyn’s protective instincts. In his Hollywood memo he confirmed that part of Charles’s ‘romantic affection’ for Sebastian was ‘the protective feeling of a strong towards a weak character’.
It is Anthony Blanche who fleshes out Sebastian, as he had known him since Eton. The words are almost certainly a memory of what Evelyn had heard Brian Howard say of Hugh Lygon, whom he adored: ‘I was at school with him … everyone in Pop liked him, of course, and all the masters. I expect it was that they were all really jealous of him. He never seemed to get into trouble … he was the only boy in my house never to be beaten at all.’ Sebastian’s charm and kindness give him immunity from the bullying that usually comes from the jealousy of other boys. Like Hugh, ‘he isn’t very well endowed in the Top Storey’, but, as Blanche admits, ‘those that have charm don’t really need brains’. Sebastian is equally impeccable in his manners and his taste in clothes (Charvet ties, dove-grey flannel, white crepe de Chine). His beauty and eccentricities of manner endear him to all social classes. Even the grumpy barber and Charles’s manservant, Lunt, are captivated by him.
It is Sebastian who leads Charles into Arcadia, through the ‘low door … to a secret and enclosed garden’. He is a symbol not only of Oxford and undergraduate love, but also of childhood. Famously, Sebastian is first seen with a teddy bear and he first encounters Charles when vomiting through an open window on the ground floor of the quad. He then writes his apology in child-like crayon all over Charles’s best drawing paper. He takes him to meet his nanny; he loves his pillar-box-red pyjamas – and of course that teddy bear. Aloysius is in the best Waugh tradition of composite character creation: he is based on a combination of John Betjeman’s bear, Archie, and the teddy that Terence Greenidge observed Hugh Lygon carrying round Oxford (whose name, alas, is lost). Sebastian, like Hughie in real life, is spoilt and irresponsible, yet one cannot help loving him. In all this, he is just like a child. Lord Marchmain’s mistress Cara tells us that he is in love with his childhood.
Sebastian is also given Hugh Lygon’s darker side: his alcoholism, his weakness, his inability to grow up, his ill luck in love. Evelyn’s memo to Hollywood makes it clear that the drinking is an attempted escape. Evelyn stresses the importance of conveying ‘the gradual stages of differentiation between the habits of a group of high-spirited youngsters, all of whom on occasions get drunk in a light-hearted way, and the morbid, despairing, solitary drinking which eventually makes Sebastian an incurable alcoholic’.
‘His days in Arcadia were numbered.’ Sebastian’s fragility is treated with great sympathy. Waugh’s portrayal of his dypsomania is masterly: ‘He was more than ever emaciated; drink, which made others fat and red, seemed to wither Sebastian.’ He is shown stealing money from friends, skilfully escaping his minders, the trembling hands lighting a cigarette. Every detail is observed from life: ‘the drunken thickening in his voice’, the pallor ‘fresh and sullen as a disappointed child’. He is unkempt and there is a ‘look of wariness in his eyes’. He drinks in a ‘nervous, surreptitious way, totally unlike his old habit’. Lady Marchmain, powerless to help her son, remarks: ‘One of the most terrible things about them [drunkards] is their deceit. Love of truth is the first thing that goes.’
Evelyn used his experience not only of Hugh’s alcoholism, but also of Hubert Duggan’s, Alastair Graham’s and Olivia Plunket Greene’s. Julia, like the Lygon sisters in the understanding they showed to Hugh, apportions no blame for her brother’s drink problem: ‘It’s something chemical in him.’ Charles rejects this as cant: ‘I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the mo
ment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it; Sebastian drank to escape.’
Details from Madresfield are woven into the narrative, such as the grog tray in the library and the cocktails handed round by the footmen. There is a clear anticipation of Sebastian in Evelyn’s depiction of Hugh wandering around the library at Madresfield, rotten drunk, holding a candle in his hand. The description of Sebastian drunk at dinner shows the effects that alcoholics have on those around them: ‘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 borne – that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian at dinner that night, seeing his clouded eye and groping movements, hearing his thickened voice breaking in, ineptly, after long brutish silences.’
Coote Lygon may have been saddened by the portrayal of her brother, but she also saw that the novel was a tribute to Hugh, not a condemnation. As Cordelia makes clear, Sebastian in his fragility is close to God. Evelyn uses the word ‘holy’ to describe Sebastian in his decline. When he is ill he is described as the most patient of patients. It is left to Cordelia to describe his end, dying of alcoholism in a monastery near Carthage. The beauty has faded; he is thin, almost bald with a straggling beard; he never eats and is robbed ‘right and left’ by the people who are supposed to be looking after him. But, as Cordelia says, ‘He’s still loved, you see, wherever he goes, whatever condition he’s in. It’s a thing about him he’ll never lose.’ Like Hugh in his last years before dying at the age of thirty-one, ‘he still has his own sweet manner’. Cordelia describes Sebastian as being like others she has known: ‘I believe that they are very near and dear to God.’ She has predicted his life ‘half in, half out, of the community’, pottering around the monastery, disappearing for drinking bouts, then coming back dishevelled and more devout than ever. She describes him acting as a guide for English-speaking tourists, being completely charming. ‘Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gates dying, and showing by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.’
