by Paula Byrne
‘So true to life being in love with an entire family’
There was that slight, inherited stain upon her brightness … that unfitted her for the highest honours.
(Brideshead Revisited, regarding Julia Flyte)
Nancy Mitford’s reaction in her letter to Evelyn in Yugoslavia came to the heart of the novel. The story is that of the Golders Green boy who wrote it, lonely within his own family, so susceptible to falling in love with entire families: first the Fleming family, then the brotherhood of the Hypocrites, then the Plunket Greenes, and at last the enchantingly glamorous Lygons.
The Lygon sisters could not have failed to pick up on numerous specific details. The particular quality of the family’s beauty, with its underlying sadness, resonates throughout. Blanche describes Bridey as having a face that looked ‘as though an Aztec sculptor had attempted a portrait of Sebastian’. This is a brilliant description of Elmley, who nearly always looked so much more solemn than Hugh. Charles agrees with Blanche, but also sees that Bridey’s ‘smile, when it rarely came, was as lovely as theirs’ – though Evelyn had turned against Elmley, he still remembered their good times among the Hypocrites.
Lady Julia, like Maimie, has ‘A face of flawless Florentine quattrocento beauty’, but with an air of ‘Renaissance tragedy’. Cordelia has ‘the unmistakable family characteristics, but had them ill-arranged in a frank and chubby plainness’. As compensation, ‘all the family charm is in her smile’. This is the plump but smiling Coote, to a tee.
Elmley’s response to the novel, if he read it, is not recorded. His wife, Mona the Dane, is cruelly portrayed as the suburban Beryl Muspratt. The transformation of Elmley himself into Lord Brideshead (‘Bridey’) is not exactly flattering either. To those in the know, the identification becomes clear from the moment that Bridey is described as a Magdalen man. In Blanche’s eyes, he is ‘a learned bigot, a ceremonious barbarian, a snowbound lama’. When Bridey marries a naval widow with children who is some years older than him, Julia remarks caustically: ‘I’ll tell you one thing, she’s lied to Bridey about her age. She’s a good forty-five. I don’t see her providing an heir.’ Beryl’s background is clearly a parody of Mona’s inflated claims of her own naval connections: ‘I imagine she’s been used to bossing things rather in naval circles, with flag-lieutenants trotting round and young officers on-the-make sucking up to her.’
Elmley, whom Evelyn increasingly despised, is depicted in the novel as a repressed, aimless waste of time, though with the redeeming feature that his voice has ‘a gravity and restraint’ that in anyone else would have sounded pompous, but in him sounds ‘unassumed and unselfconscious’. ‘Bridey was a mystery,’ muses Charles Ryder, ‘a creature from the underground; a hard-snouted, burrowing, hibernating animal who shunned the light. He had been completely without action in all his years of adult life … at Brideshead he performed all unavoidable local duties, bringing with him to platform and fete and committee room his own thin mist of clumsiness and aloofness.’ He lacks all the charm and charisma of his younger brother, Sebastian, and is deficient in social graces: ‘emanating little magnetic pools of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about himself in which he floated with log-like calm’.
Bridey and his wife visit Lord Marchmain when they go abroad on their honeymoon, paralleling Elmley and Mona’s visit to Boom in Paris. Lord Marchmain dislikes Beryl: ‘She had no doubt heard of me as a man of irregular life. I can only describe her manner to me as roguish. A naughty old man, that’s what she thought I was. I suppose she had met naughty old admirals and knew how they should be humoured.’ Other than the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, this is as close as we get to any hint of Boom’s homosexual proclivities in the portrayal of Lord Marchmain.
The Flyte girls feel ousted from Brideshead, as did the Lygons, who left Madresfield after their brother’s marriage. The good-natured Coote was revealingly and uncharacteristically acerbic when in her letter to Evelyn of 1956 she compared Elmley and Mona to Jane Austen’s Mr and Mrs John Dashwood, adding: ‘I often think of sending them an annotated copy.’ One can readily imagine the annotations to the sequence in which the John Dashwoods viciously disinherit the three lovely sisters and force them out of their beloved family home.
Coote was discreetly silent on the subject of her reaction to the youngest Flyte daughter, Cordelia. The character’s name is that of the youngest and most beloved daughter of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the one on whom he pins his hopes of being looked after in exile. Coote’s loyal correspondence with Boom was truly Cordelia-like. She was at Madresfield that first time Maimie brought Evelyn to the house in October 1931. Years later, she remembered ‘running out over the bridge in the starlight when she [Maimie] arrived and seeing this unknown and unexpected figure emerging from the car – it was Evelyn’. Charles Ryder’s first sight of Cordelia is his memory of this moment: she is a lively and engaging child, but without ‘the promise of Julia’s full quattrocento loveliness’. Later, Charles is shocked by how life’s circumstances have changed her: Cordelia, like Coote, goes abroad for the war, Coote to Italy, she to Spain.
It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed, could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia and her. She was unmistakably their sister, without any of Julia’s or Sebastian’s grace, without Brideshead’s gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact … hard living had roughened her … she straddled a little as she sat by the fire and when she said ‘It’s wonderful to be home,’ it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.
This is a harsh description, but Charles comes to see her inner beauty. Cordelia bluntly asks him whether he is disappointed in how she has turned out: ‘Did you think, ‘‘Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works’’? Did you think ‘‘thwarted’’?’ Charles replied that he did, but now does not, so much: ‘she too had a beauty of her own’.
Lady Julia owes something to Olivia Plunket Greene, who was in love with religion, but she also owes much to Baby Jungman and Maimie Lygon: her beauty, her glamour, her spidery body, her way of talking, her flapper slang. Above all, Julia has a ‘magical sadness’ that draws Charles to her. Like Maimie, she graces the fashionable columns of the newspapers, is supremely elegant, well-dressed, wearing cloche hats and carrying her Pekingese, driving her motor car. She has none of the pomposity of Bridey, and all the ease and unaffectedness of Sebastian. In his various revisions of the novel, Waugh changed Julia’s hair colour from dark to Maimie’s gold, and then back to dark. Children and dogs adore her, as they adored Maimie. And she does not make the marriage that is expected of her.
The most remarkable detail suggesting that Evelyn was thinking of Maimie when he created the character of Julia Flyte is based on a piece of very private knowledge. Julia is described as outshining all the girls of her age. She is an obvious candidate for an answer to the question that preoccupies all the ladies in high society: ‘Whom would the young princes marry? … They could not hope for purer lineage or a more gracious presence than Julia’s; but there was this faint shadow on her that unfitted her for the highest honours.’ That shadow is ‘the scandal of her father’. The sequence is clearly based on Evelyn’s knowledge of the reason why the affair between Maimie and Prince George did not lead to marriage.*
Waugh’s Hollywood memo said that when Charles first meets Julia ‘she has the world at her feet’. Maimie had the world at her feet, but, as with Julia, her father’s disgrace ensures that she is ostracised by society. Julia says: ‘I’ve grown up with one family skeleton, you know – papa. Not to be talked of in front of the servants, not to be talked of in front of us when we were children.’
Waugh’s memo emphasised that Charles Ryder’s love for Sebastian is in part a foreshadowing of his love for Julia. When Julia asks Charles why he married the awful Celia, he says:
‘Loneliness, missing Sebastian.’
‘You loved him
, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes. He was the forerunner.’
Julia understood.
Later he repeats that Sebastian was the forerunner: ‘I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was the Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.’ The idea of the forerunner, of a love for the brother and the sister that is somehow the same, is a brilliant device on Waugh’s part: it allows him to express the idea that what he is really in love with is the family, not any one member of it, and at the same time it makes Brideshead into one of the great expressions of what might be called the bisexual imagination.
Nevertheless, few readers have felt as compelled by the character of Julia as by that of Sebastian, or indeed feel convinced by the passion between Charles and Julia. Whilst it is unfair to describe her as ‘dead as mutton’, as Christopher Sykes did, there is a strong sense that the passion between Charles and Sebastian is better executed. For example, Charles’s lingering gaze on Sebastian is intensely erotic: ‘We lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile … the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.’ Charles is mesmerised by his mouth, ‘watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches’. But there is much less eroticism when the image is repeated later in the story: when Charles lights Julia a cigarette, he takes it from his mouth to hers, revealing a ‘thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me’.
Late in life, Maimie laughingly dismissed any identification of herself with Julia, on the grounds that she and Evelyn were friends, not lovers: ‘Evelyn was the last person I’d have fallen in love with: ours was just a great friendship. I would confide all my love affairs to him and he would confide all his to me.’ The irony is that the relationship between Charles and Julia would have been more successfully portrayed if it had been closer to that in real life between Evelyn and Maimie: a deep friendship, not a love affair. But Waugh’s hand was forced. The structure of the novel required him to introduce a love affair between Charles and Julia for two reasons. First, it was the way of creating the potential for Charles actually to become a member of the family – he nearly inherits Brideshead. And secondly, for Julia to have been the friend and Sebastian the lover would have been too overtly homosexual. As Lord Beauchamp’s extra-marital involvements are made heterosexual in Lord Marchmain, so the sexual attraction has to be transferred from Sebastian to Julia. But it is no more than a bat’s squeak.
Lord Marchmain’s Palace of Sin
‘He daren’t show his great purple face anywhere. He is the last, historic, authentic case of someone being hounded out of society.’
(Anthony Blanche on Lord Marchmain,
in the original manuscript of Brideshead)
To those in the know, such as Chips Channon, Lord Marchmain in his crumbling palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice was unmistakably Beauchamp.
Charles is interested in the effect of Lord Marchmain’s disgrace on the rest of the family:
‘It must have upset you all when your father went away.’
‘All but Cordelia. She was too young.* It upset me at the time. Mummy tried to explain it to the three eldest so that we wouldn’t hate papa … I was his favourite. I should be staying with him now, if it wasn’t for this foot. I’m the only one who goes. Why don’t you come too? You’d like him.’
This passage is one of the novel’s few concessions to Lady Marchmain. It raises the possibility that one of the Lygon children may have told Evelyn about that moving letter their mother wrote to them. What he certainly did know was that Hugh was the child who spent most time with his father in the years of exile. In Brideshead, Sebastian is the family member most loyal to his father, the one who goes out to Venice with papers for signature.
As with Hugh, Sebastian’s devotion and loyalty to his errant father is unquestionable. He tells Charles that ‘papa is a social leper’, that he lives in a ‘palace of sin’, and that the family has been tainted by sexual scandal, but this only adds to his glamour and mystery. Waugh admired Hugh Lygon’s beauty, his loyalty, his courage and his gift for friendship. He also admired his way of dealing with his father’s disgrace. It was Hugh who talked his father out of committing suicide. It was Hugh who travelled the globe to be with his father. Evelyn also saw how his vulnerable friend drank to escape his mother, his fear of failure, and, given what had happened to his father, his own homosexuality. At Oxford, at Madresfield and in the isolation of the Arctic, he had witnessed at first hand Hugh’s great attraction and great despair.
The depiction in Brideshead of Lord Marchmain, whom Charles first meets in his ‘palace of sin’ in Venice, is drawn from Waugh’s own first meeting with Lord Beauchamp in Rome: ‘I was full of curiosity to meet Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress.’ The notion of his studied ‘normality’ takes on additional resonance when one recalls the context in which Waugh used the word, with probing quotation marks, in his review of Compton Mackenzie’s Thin Ice.
Lord Marchmain is described as having ‘a noble face … slightly weary, slightly sardonic, slightly voluptuous. He seemed to be in the prime of life; it was odd to think that he was only a few years younger than my father.’ Anthony Blanche is more cutting in his description, but again it is an accurate and, to those who knew him, slightly uncomfortable description of Boom: ‘a little fleshy, perhaps, but very handsome, a magnifico, a voluptuary, Byronic, bored, infectiously slothful, not at all the sort of man you would expect to see easily put down’.
Both Marchmain and Beauchamp are men of high culture with a keen interest in porphyry. Marchmain is described as ‘following the sun’, just as Beauchamp followed the sun by wintering in Australia and then returning to Italy and France for the summer months. Lord Marchmain advises Charles to ‘stick to the churches’ in order to avoid the searing Venetian heat, as Evelyn had loved the cool of the churches in Venice and visited churches in Rome with Lord Beauchamp.
The ‘murky background’ of the Flytes resonates with that of the Lygons. In Brideshead Lord Marchmain’s status as social pariah is masterfully executed. He stays away from dining at the Luna restaurant, as it is ‘filling up with English now’. Charles and Sebastian are taken to Florian’s for coffee, where Lord Marchmain is snubbed by a party of English people, who are making for a table close to them and move away when they see who it is, suddenly talking with their heads close together. They are a Catholic man and woman that Lord Marchmain used to know when he was in politics. Just before this, Lord Marchmain is talking about how undignified the English are ‘when they attempt to express moral disapproval’. He plays tennis with the professional coach, not with friends (Beauchamp was a keen tennis player). Lord Marchmain is also a Liberal, on the left of his party: ‘I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling block to my own party. Well, my elder son will change all that.’ The latter allusion is to Bridey’s defection to the Tories: when the Liberal Party split over participation in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, Elmley joined the breakaway National Liberal grouping which later merged with the Conservative Party. Like Lord Beauchamp, Lord Marchmain despises his pious estranged wife, blaming her for his ostracism. And the references to footmen are striking. The syphilitic Kurt is described as a ‘footman’ from a popular film. Given all these connections, Chips Channon’s knowing diary entry is hardly surprising.
Chapel and Fountain
What a place to live in!
(Charles Ryder, on first seeing Brideshead Castle)
Lady Dorothy Lygon said that there was no resemblance between the landscape and architecture of the fictional Brideshead Castle and the real Madresfield Court, with the exception of the chapel. This is not so. Although Evelyn’s most direct
portrayal of the physical characteristics of the house was in A Handful of Dust, many elements of Brideshead are shaped by Madresfield.
The surrounding landscape, the tiny village with post office and pub, the river, the sense of ‘a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced, in a single winding valley’, the house nestling out of sight, ‘couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken’: each loving detail offers an exact description of Madresfield. The ‘blue remembered hills’, as A. E. Housman called the Malverns, provide protection for Madresfield, just as with Brideshead, ‘round it, guarding and hiding it, stood the soft hills’. The estate’s woods of beech and oak, its avenues of lime and poplars, its wide green parklands, are all borrowed from Madresfield. On the other hand, Brideshead is not a moated house like Hetton Abbey. Nor is it red brick, nor Victorian Gothic. There is always an element of distortion and a fusion of different models in Waugh’s fictional recreation of people and places.
Coote observed that Brideshead is ‘an epitome of stone of the Palladian style [Evelyn] loved so much. It is grey-gold, with a distinctive dome. This is the main feature derived from Castle Howard, with its famous central dome by Sir John Vanbrugh, a highly unusual feature for a private dwelling. From the dome stretch out the fountain, the lakes, the temple and the obelisk, all reminiscent of Castle Howard and giving some justification to the use of that location in both the television and movie adaptations of the novel.
