by Paula Byrne
Charles responds by thinking back to the youth with the teddy bear under the flowering chestnuts. ‘It’s not what one would have foretold,’ he says. To which Cordelia replies: ‘One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is – no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering.’ The association of holiness with suffering, applied to a character named Sebastian, suggests that there is another dimension besides alcohol to the story.
‘The attraction of man to man’
It is in many ways a great inconvenience (though there are manifest compensations) to have ‘unnatural’ sexual appetites.
(Evelyn Waugh, review of Compton Mackenzie’s Thin Ice)
‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion.’
(Anthony Blanche to Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited)
Sebastian Flyte is named after Saint Sebastian. His name is symbolic. His family name Flyte represents him in flight from his religion and his family, but it is also suggestive of the image of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, in which he is depicted with a flight of arrows assailing his body.
In the Italian Renaissance, Saint Sebastian was possibly the most frequently painted figure after Mary and Jesus. He was valued by artists who saw in him a figure of Hellenic beauty, and a rare opportunity to paint a male nude at a time when female nudes predominated. His highly eroticised figure was painted by nearly all the major artists of the period, including Bellini, Tintoretto, Mantegna, Titian, Guido Reni (seven times), Giorgione, Perugino, Botticelli, Veronese (a series of magnificent wall frescoes in the church of San Sebastiano), Bazzi (known as Il Sodoma), and many others. His story lent itself to great art, combining beauty, suffering and ecstasy. He is the embodiment of what is sometimes cruelly called ‘Catholic porn’.
Saint Sebastian was born to a wealthy family in the third century and was executed for refusing to renounce Christianity. He was tied to a tree and fired at with arrows, but miraculously survived and was later clubbed to death and thrown into a sewer.
A beautiful young man, virtually naked, bound to a tree and pierced with arrows, with a face either passive or displaying religious ecstasy: Saint Sebastian is now known as the patron saint of homosexuality (as well as of athletes). It was in the nineteenth century that the homosexual cult of him took hold. Several of the classic twentieth-century texts of gay literature partake of the cult: there is an explicit allusion in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Tennessee Williams wrote a poem called ‘San Sebastiano de Sodoma’, and the adolescent protagonist of Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask (1948) first masturbates over a photograph of a painting of Saint Sebastian. Oscar Wilde used the alias ‘Sebastian’ in Paris. When he visited Keats’s grave in Rome, he compared the dead poet to the martyred saint: ‘As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido’s Saint Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree and, though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening Heavens.’
Anthony Blanche’s parting shot at the end of Sebastian’s luncheon party – ‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion’ – could hardly make clearer the connection between Lord Sebastian and the martyr. When Evelyn was in Venice with Maimie in 1932 he wandered the churches of Venice to escape the heat and became acquainted with numerous paintings of the saint and the Church of Saint Sebastian with its superb wall frescoes by Veronese. And then there was his memory of that other Church of Saint Sebastian Outside the Walls, in Rome, with Giorgetti’s highly eroticised horizontal statue and the arrows of Saint Sebastian, where he waited in vain for Alastair Graham in 1927.
Charles and Sebastian’s ‘romantic affection’ is partly sexual. Their ‘naughtiness is high in the catalogue of grave sins’. Charles has no regrets about his Oxford sexual experimentation: ‘all the wickedness of that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro, heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table’.
Charles’s attitude is very close to Waugh’s own. And Evelyn’s, in turn, is very close to that of Terence Greenidge, the Oxford friend who introduced him to the homoerotic environment of the Hypocrites. In 1930, Evelyn gave a largely favourable review in the Fortnightly to Greenidge’s Degenerate Oxford? – the question mark was an integral part of the title, since the aim of Terence’s book was to refute suggestions that had been aired in the press that Oxford was a haven for upper-class indolence and sodomitical indulgence. The core of the book was a defence of the Oxford ‘Aesthetes’ and their ‘romances’.
‘Oxford romances often are not pursued to lengths which would engender conflicts with our criminal code,’ Greenidge asserted. He admitted that ‘Queer deeds may occasionally get done among those who come from over-emancipated Public Schools’, but claimed that ‘the majority of us favour that vague romanticism which may be likened to a warm, misty July morning’. He then went on to argue that Oxford Aesthetes were ‘young men who are in a state of transition … We become normal when we go down.’ His own case, he suggested, was typical: he was now happily married with a wife and child – though, in reality, Greenidge would spend the next few years writing novels called Brass and Paint and The Magnificent, which were regarded by the police as homosexual pornography. All copies were called in and very nearly all were destroyed.
Greenidge’s favoured term for ‘the attraction of man for man’ was ‘Romanticism’ rather than ‘Homosexuality’. He argued that it came to the essence of the sensibility of the Aesthetes, suffusing every aspect of their Oxford lives. He was thinking of something deeper than the way that male-male relationships were inevitable in an environment where females were kept sequestered in separate colleges, though that was part of the story. Citing the character of Michael Fane in Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, he linked ‘Romanticism’ to the peculiar beauty and antiquity of Oxford as a city:
The whole town possesses a charm so emphatically not of our twentieth-century civilisation that one tends to think – maybe more than one should – about romance, and to believe firmly that the romance must be of an exotic kind. Conventional frivolling with conventional girls just would not do. Oxford is so different from Lyons’ Corner House. I have heard hard-bitten and respected men of the world confess that when they revisited their ‘alma mater’ they found their minds becoming full of thoughts and aspirations to which they hoped they were now for ever strangers. A queer lotus dust seems to blow around an unreal city.
This is a brilliant diagnosis of what might be called ‘the Brideshead Complex’, written fifteen years before Brideshead by the man who ushered Evelyn Waugh to the door of the world that would become Brideshead. In anticipation of Evelyn, Terence Greenidge had unlocked the Oxford secret that Q in ‘Alma Mater’ said ‘none can utter’.
Greenidge went on to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of Oxford ‘Romanticism’. He suggested that the primary advantage was that it made its practitioners ‘specially sympathetic and nicely sensitive’, with the result that they would go on to treat women as friends rather than sexual objects:
A girl once said to me, shortly after I had left Oxford, ‘There’s a thing I like about you. Although you are not actually feminine in nature, there are womanly bits to your mind, and they make you rather specially sympathetic and nicely sensitive.’ I mention this remark not because it might seem complimentary to myself, but because it struck me at the time as being an interesting criticism, and an epitome of one of the defences which the Oxford Romanticist puts up for himself.
This is wholly applicable to Evel
yn: it was his Oxford Romanticism – his ‘homosexual phase’, as would now be said – that made possible his incomparable gift for friendship with women.
The greatest disadvantage of the condition, Terence Greenidge went on to contend, was that ‘in several cases – though not in all, as some of my earlier stories will show – Romanticism seems to be attended by a feeling of guilty secrecy’, which is unhealthy and dangerous. ‘I do remember an occasion,’ he recalled, ‘when all of a sudden some of us came across quite trustworthy evidence of the romantic friendships of a prominent undergraduate politician, who had shown such diplomacy in this particular department of his life that previously not a whisper of scandal had been wafted to ears which would have been most anxious to receive it.’
Guilty secrecy was the special preserve of the homosexual politician whose career would be ruined by scandal. And no one in the Oxford of Greenidge and Waugh knew this better than the sons of Lord Beauchamp. Hugh Lygon would never have made a politician like his father and brother, but his status and connections were such that in public, and even within his family, he had no choice but to harbour his homosexuality as if it were a guilty secret.
Evelyn’s one reservation in his review of Degenerate Oxford? concerned Greenidge’s coy substitution of the word ‘Romanticism’ for ‘homosexuality’: ‘I could do with more plain speaking about homo-sexuality. By his implied assumption that homo-sexual relations among undergraduates are merely romantic and sentimental he seems to avoid the most important questions at issue.’ Writing his review in 1930, Evelyn hinted that ‘queer deeds’ were a great deal more common among the Aesthetes than Greenidge implied. By the time he came to write Brideshead in 1944, he was more guarded. The hints about naughtiness ‘high in the catalogue of grave sins’ are there, but the primary emphasis is upon ‘romantic affection’.
Whereas Charles Ryder grows out of his ‘Romanticism’, Sebastian is as reluctant to renounce his homosexuality as he is to relinquish his teddy bear, his pillar-box-red pyjamas and his nanny. As with Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon in real life, Sebastian is unable to settle down. He becomes part of a nomadic, expatriate community in which he is left free to have male lovers. Sebastian, we are told by Blanche, finds a sailor in Athens who speaks American, ‘lay up with him until his ship sailed, and popped back to Constantinople. And that was that.’
His German lover, Kurt, has syphilis, and when the monk views the relationship as an innocent friendship, Charles’s reply is cynical: ‘Poor simple monk … poor booby.’ Charles, out of loyalty to Sebastian, tells his brother Bridey that there is ‘nothing vicious’ in his relationship with Kurt, but in private he thinks differently. Rex Mottram, when recommending a therapist who can help Sebastian with his alcoholism, adds ‘he takes sex cases too’.
Sebastian’s homosexuality, like Hugh Lygon’s, causes him to feel self-hatred and guilt: ‘I wouldn’t love anyone with a character like mine … I’m ashamed of myself … I absolutely detest myself.’ Charles sees the damage that has been done by Sebastian’s overbearing religious mother: ‘Without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.’ For Hugh, the combination of a secretly homosexual father and an almost maniacally religious mother was toxic. For him in life, as for Sebastian in the novel, alcoholism was the consequence of his sense of guilt and his desire to escape himself. Lady Marchmain contends that Sebastian’s flight mirrors his father’s: ‘Both of them unhappy, ashamed, and running away.’
For his portrayal of Lord Marchmain, Evelyn drew heavily upon Lord Beauchamp, with one significant difference. In deference to the Lygon family, he removed almost all traces of Boom’s homosexuality. Instead, Lord Marchmain is given a mistress, Cara, with whom he escapes the stranglehold of the pious Lady Marchmain. Coote insisted that the matrimonial problems of Lord and Lady Marchmain could ‘in no way be equated with those which beset my parents’. Nevertheless, there is a strong hint in Anthony Blanche’s comment about the breakdown of the marriage, which resonates vividly with that of the Beauchamps:
She has convinced the world that Lord Marchmain is a monster … You would think that the old reprobate had tortured her, stolen her patrimony, flung her out of doors, roasted, stuffed and eaten his children, and gone frolicking about wreathed in all the flowers of Sodom and Gomorrah.*
Given how openly Lady Sibell and her sisters talked about Lady Beauchamp’s overzealous piety, and its alienating effects on the family, it is significant that Lord Marchmain’s reason for sexual infidelity is his wife’s oppressive religiosity. The Lygons certainly never blamed their father or were ashamed of his homosexuality. Their view was that their mother was impossible to live with and they always blamed the family catastrophe on Bendor’s jealousy and homophobia rather than ever pointing a finger at their father.
Evelyn shared the Lygons’ liberal views towards homosexuality. Of Oscar Wilde, he wrote: ‘He got himself in trouble, poor old thing, by the infringement of a very silly law, which was just as culpable and just as boring as an infringement of traffic or licensing regulations.’ In their later years, Maimie and Evelyn exchanged views on homosexual literature. In 1955, when Maimie was mentally ill and recovering in a rest home, Evelyn told her he was reading Christopher Isherwood’s The World in the Evening. Isherwood’s novel was a frank story about a bisexual man whose marriage implodes: ‘Your dear father would not have approved,’ he wrote, somewhat mischievously.
A year later, Evelyn wrote a favourable review of Compton Mackenzie’s novel Thin Ice, applauding it for taking as its theme a subject that he says had been unduly neglected in English literature, ‘that of the homosexual male’. Evelyn bemoaned the fact that most homosexual writers falsified and transposed their material by heterosexualising their material (hardly surprising in view of the law of the land prior to the Wolfenden Report of 1957). Evelyn went on to argue that ‘normality’ – a word which he insisted on placing between inverted commas – is ‘certainly an almost meaningless expression’: ‘The absolute norm is an abstract from which all men vary in greater or less degree … the vagaries of human lust are fully catalogued … we have become less xenophobic in condemning sexual eccentricity … it is [Compton Mackenzie’s] intention to utter a temperate and sage call to order.’
He greatly admired the novel, which takes as its theme a brilliant, young and well-born politician named Henry Fortescue who is adored by women and is described as a ‘future Prime Minister’. He is also homosexual. Afraid to ruin his career, Fortescue exercises self-control in regard of his sexual appetites, but his political career fails for other reasons. Beset by his political failures, he throws caution to the wind and becomes ‘first indulgent and then reckless’ in his ‘lawless pleasures’. He embraces a seedy underworld of male prostitution: ‘It is this aspect of lawlessness, with the concomitant of blackmail, which characterises the life of the homosexual.’ Evelyn was aware that the cook at Madresfield had tried to blackmail Lord Beauchamp and saw at first hand his rootless life.
Evelyn admired a scene in Thin Ice in which the politician is arrested in a gay bar, but then released by a merciful policeman, especially as it was based on a real incident that was common gossip during the latter stages of the war. ‘It is delightful to see this highly diverting anecdote, which was unlikely to find its way into the protagonist’s reminiscences, so admirably preserved for posterity.’ The anecdote in question involved Evelyn’s old school friend, the politician and journalist Tom Driberg. He was arrested for fellating a Norwegian sailor in an air-raid shelter, but released on the way to the station when the policeman discovered that Driberg was the author of the ‘William Hickey’ column in the Daily Express, of which he happened to be a great admirer. But in reading Thin Ice, Evelyn could not have avoided thinking about how Lord Beauchamp’s increasing sexual recklessness ruined his political career. The appealing thing about Mackenzie’s novel was its reversal of the pattern: ‘a man whose moral character is ruined by political failure’.
Evely
n may have joked about ‘buggers’ and ‘pansies’ in his letters, but he was irritated by an American play about homosexuals which showed them in a poor light: ‘they all commit suicide’ he complained to Nancy Mitford; ‘The idea of a happy pansy is incomprehensible to them.’ In his own way, Sebastian is entirely happy with the sponger Kurt: ‘It’s funny, I couldn’t get on without him, you know,’ he tells Charles in Morocco, ‘it’s rather a pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself.’
In Brideshead Waugh paid tribute to his formative homosexual affairs, and acknowledged the happiness they had brought. Despite the ‘grave sins’ committed at Oxford, ‘there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence’. In the face of cousin Jasper’s ‘grand remonstrance’ (based on a similar confrontation with his brother Alec), Charles has no regrets: ‘Looking back, now after twenty years, there is little I would have left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper’s game-cock maturity with a sturdier fowl … I could tell him too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.’ That lesson of the novel was what led Henry Yorke, who did not indulge in ‘Romanticism’ whilst at Oxford, to thank Evelyn for his personal copy of Brideshead with the wistful words ‘I wish I had been in love at Oxford when I was up. I see now what I have missed.’
