by Paula Byrne
Evelyn’s Hollywood memo cites the vital importance of two architectural features: the chapel and the fountain. ‘I suggest that before I leave Hollywood,’ he wrote, ‘I should be allowed to see preliminary sketches of these two features drawn under my supervision.’ The fountain represents the worldly magnificence and grace of the family which captivates Charles and the chapel symbolises his redemption.
The fountain was not in fact based upon Castle Howard’s Atlas Fountain, as is often supposed. It was, in Evelyn’s own words, ‘brought from Italy and I see it as a combination of three famous works of Bernini at Rome … the Trevi and Piazza fountains and the elephant bearing the obelisk in the Piazza Minerva, which the Romans fondly call ‘‘the little pig’’ ’. The Brideshead fountain is ‘an oval basin with an island of formal rocks at its centre; on the rocks grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation and wild English fern in its natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams that counterfeited springs, and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards and an ebullient lion all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone’. Waugh has in a sense brought back to Mad the fountains that he visited in Rome with Boom.
The circumstances of the commissioning of the Arts and Crafts chapel, Boom’s wedding present from his wife, are reversed in the novel: it is Lord Marchmain’s present to his religious wife. The Brideshead chapel, as Coote admitted, was based precisely on the Madresfield chapel, with its Arts and Crafts decoration and the huge life-size frescoes of the earl and his wife and their children frolicking as angels. Even the firebuckets are in the Beauchamp colours of maroon and cream.
Evelyn, in common with his hero, professed admiration for homes that passed down the generations in the same family. Mad had done this since the eleventh century. In Brideshead Charles says: ‘More even than the work of great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation.’
But with the modern age – the Great War, the introduction of death duties, then another war – the buildings were decaying. The Flytes’ London home is Marchmain House, which they call ‘Marchers’, just as Halkyn House is called ‘Halkers’ by the Lygon family. ‘It’s sad about Marchers, isn’t it,’ says Cordelia near the end of the novel; ‘Do you know they’re going to build a block of flats and that Rex wanted to take what he called a ‘‘penthouse’’ at the top?’ In reality, Mona had tried to convert Halkers into flats, though she had been turned down by – the old nemesis – the Westminster estate, who owned the freehold. It was sold instead to the Syrian Arab Embassy. It’s now the home of the Ghana High Commission.
Lord Marchmain leaves his crumbling palazzo on the Grand Canal to die at his home in England. Knowing that, in the normal course of things, Brideshead would be inherited by Lord Brideshead and Beryl, he plans to leave the great house instead to Julia and Charles. According to Lygon family tradition, Lord Beauchamp did not want his eldest son to inherit Madresfield. He wanted to leave it to Hugh.
Conversion
It was, of course, all about the deathbed. I was present at almost exactly that scene.
(Evelyn Waugh to Ronald Knox)
Many of Evelyn’s friends and critics were appalled by the deathbed conversion of Lord Marchmain. But for Evelyn himself, this scene was the whole point of the book. To those who complained that it was unrealistic, Evelyn replied that it was a piece of reportage. He had been present at the very scene – a moment of profound spiritual significance for him. This is one of the masterstrokes of his art of composite creation: he imagines Boom on his deathbed undergoing a conversion experience like that of Maimie’s old boyfriend, Hubert Duggan.
Charles Ryder’s spiritual epiphany occurs in this scene. The operation of divine grace upon him comes at Lord Marchmain’s death, when he prays for a sign and the dying man makes the sign of the cross. The epilogue sees him kneeling at the altar of the Brideshead chapel, praying ‘an ancient, newly-learned form of words’.
For most of the novel, Charles appears to be a non-believer, though there are clues that this is a novel narrated by a convert. The Flytes’ faith is an enigma to Charles, ‘and not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve’. But Charles is also shown fighting God, mocking Catholicism as ‘mumbo jumbo’ and ‘an awful lot of nonsense’. Sebastian replies: ‘Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.’
Early in the novel there is a strong clue in the lines: ‘I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real.’ In the end, Charles submits to God’s grace as quietly as Evelyn, who wrote in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: ‘Conversion suggests an event more sudden and emotional than his calm acceptance of the propositions of his faith.’
When Charles says that Catholics seem just like other people, he is rebuked by Sebastian: ‘My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not … they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think is important is different from other people.’ Charles’s prayer for a miracle at Lord Marchmain’s dying scene is a prayer for Julia. But when the miracle occurs, it is his own soul that is saved. In Evelyn’s memo to Hollywood he says that the importance of the relationship between Charles and Julia is for each ‘to bring the other to the Church’. Julia must renounce Charles in part to atone for her sins. She explains that if she gives up the thing she most loves, then God won’t despair of her. Julia’s bargain is very similar to Helen’s in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. She makes a plea with God to save Bendrick’s life and if God spares him she will renounce him. This sort of plea makes sense to a Catholic, but not to anyone else. Charles himself makes this perfectly clear: ‘I do understand.’
The Anglican Nancy Mitford was confused about the theology and Julia’s renunciation of Charles: ‘Now I believe in God and I talk to him a very great deal and often tell him jokes … he also likes people to be happy and people who love each other to live together – so long as nobody’s else’s life is upset (and then he’s not so sure).’ Evelyn patiently explained: ‘It must be nonsense to say people never give up sleeping together for ‘‘abstract’’ principles. Anyway why ‘‘abstract’’? Is the crown of England or the love of God abstract? Of course with Julia Flyte the fact that the war was coming and she saw her life coming to an end anyhow, made a difference.’ In the memo, he goes further: ‘I regard it as essential that after having led a life of sin Julia should not be immediately rewarded with conventional happiness. She has a great debt to pay and we are left with her paying it.’ In other words, there will be no Hollywood ending for Charles and Julia.
The important point, Evelyn stressed, was that Charles is reconciled to Julia’s renunciation: ‘He has realised that the way they were going was not ordained for them, and that the physical dissolution of the house of Brideshead has in fact been a spiritual regeneration.’ This message of hope, ‘that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters’, is made clear in the epilogue. Whilst the fountain is covered in barbed wire and debris, the chapel is unchanged. Charles comes full circle when he returns to the house, sees Nanny and then visits the chapel and kneels to pray.
The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate, and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola citivas. Vanity of all vanities, all is vanity.
And yet, I thought … Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work … something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame … the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs … It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this m
orning, burning anew among the old stones.
This is the moment when Mad World is transformed into the Kingdom of Heaven. The big house slips away and the original title of Brideshead reasserts itself: ‘the household of the faith’.
Evelyn had helped to save Hubert Duggan’s soul. It was one of the great moments of his life. He had tried and failed to convert Hugh Lygon. After the war, he tried to save Maimie, once Hubert’s lover, begging her to let him pimp for her with the Holy Ghost. This was serious business. There was simply nothing he would not do to save his friends.
Maimie wrote to him in 1959 to tell him that she had lost her faith. He responded by asking her whether he could introduce her to a real ‘beast’ (priest) and asks her to come and see him: ‘loss of faith is the saddest thing that can happen to one’. His next letter says that he knows a priest who was a friend of Hugh’s at Oxford:
I believe that everyone once in his (or her) life has the moment when he is open to Divine Grace … sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed – when all resistance is down and Grace can come flooding in … I don’t know, darling Blondy, whether that is your condition now, but if it is, it’s not a thing to dilly-dally about … I think it is just your soul opening up to God. I’d awfully like to pimp for you in that affair.*
Maimie was being offered her own moment akin to Charles’s at the end of the novel. Like Hugh before her, she rejected the offer.
Snobs and Catholics
Those critics who disliked Brideshead did so on two grounds, that it was Catholic propaganda and that the novel venerated the aristocracy. The American critic Edmund Wilson, who greatly admired Waugh, was mortified: ‘Waugh’s snobbery, hitherto held in check by his satirical point of view, has here emerged shameless and rampant.’
When Evelyn was accused of being snobbish and in love with the aristocracy he defended himself vigorously: ‘Class consciousness, particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mentioning a prostitute sixty years ago.’ In his diary he noted: ‘Most of the reviews have been laudatory except where they were embittered by class resentment.’
He was well aware of inverted snobbery and could not have cared less that he was writing about a now unfashionable subject, and that writing about the working classes was all the fashion. In fact, he revelled in his position, saying ‘I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.’ As his son, Auberon, later pointed out, Evelyn’s supposed romantic attachment to the aristocratic idea was employed chiefly to annoy people.
Evelyn loved to provoke his critics. In an interview in 1962 he said: ‘I don’t know them (the working classes) and I’m not interested in them. No writer before the middle of the nineteenth century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesques or pastoral decorations. Then, when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.’ When Nancy Mitford was asked why she wrote about aristocrats, she said that it was because she knew them best. To ask her to write about factory workers would be ‘like asking Jane Austen to write about Siberian Peasants’. Evelyn defended his position in the Spectator: ‘In place of the old, simple view of Christianity that differences of wealth and learning cannot affect the reality and ultimate importance of the individual, there has risen the new, complicated and stark crazy theory that only the poor are real and important and that the only live art is the art of the People.’
When he was accused of being a snob by the Bell, a paper widely read by Irish Catholics, he said: ‘I think perhaps your reviewer is right in calling me a snob; that is to say I am happiest in the company of the European upper classes; but I do not think this preference is necessarily an offence against Charity, still less against the Faith … Besides Hooper there are two characters in Brideshead Revisited whom I represent as worldly – Rex Mottram, a millionaire, and Lady Celia Ryder, a lady of high birth. Why did my reverence for money and rank not sanctify those two?’
Ryder and his creator do not love lords indiscriminately. Viscount Mulcaster is a mindless oaf, without the aristocratic grace of Sebastian. In the manuscript version of the novel, Mulcaster is ‘a peer like pig’, he is fat, badly dressed, with ‘an idiot gape’. The members of the Bullingdon are presented as illiterate upper-class thugs, ‘disorderly footmen’, repressed homosexual Neanderthals. The Flytes themselves are deeply flawed. Lady Marchmain is cold and pious; Sebastian is a drunken wastrel and Bridey a pompous fool. Lord Marchmain also has his dark side: ‘I had always been aware of a frame of malevolence under his urbanity.’ Only Cordelia, like the sister in Shakespeare’s King Lear after whom she is named, is purely good.
The irony of Waugh’s career is that having written this book for himself, not caring whether it sold well or not, knowing and believing that his subject was out of time and kilter (and loving it for all of these things), it became an immediate bestseller in both Britain and America. A Labour government was elected in 1945, the year of its publication, ushering in the age of the common man, the age of Hooper (and it must be said that the portrayal of Hooper is not without warmth, say, in comparison with that of Bridey the heir to Brideshead). By a further irony, the very same forces that led to the egalitarian aspirations which swept Labour to power also fed the nostalgia that made Brideshead a bestseller. Evelyn yet again found himself in tune with the Zeitgeist. Although his higher-brow literary friends and his sterner critics objected to his subject matter, ordinary readers were fed up with war, rationing and deprivation, and they loved the escapism of Brideshead, suffused as it was ‘with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language’. The country had been through so much that people no longer wanted to read about poverty and ordinariness. Waugh thus confounded his critics.
What really stung Evelyn was the impugning of his faith as a Catholic. To Conor Cruise O’Brien, who attacked him in The Tablet for his ‘almost mystical veneration for the upper classes’, he was quick to respond: ‘In England Catholicism is predominantly a religion of the poor. There is a handful of Catholic aristocratic families, but I knew none of them in 1930 when I was received into the Church. My friends were fashionable agnostics and the Faith I then accepted had none of the extraneous glamour which your reviewer imputes to it.’
Edmund Wilson, in a wilful misreading of Brideshead, declared that ‘what has caused Mr Waugh’s hero to plump to his knees is not, perhaps, the sign of the cross, but the prestige, in the person of Lord Marchmain, of one of the oldest families in England’.
Yet Lord Marchmain is a social pariah, ignored by the great and good, hounded out of society. He is more like the gospel’s woman taken in adultery than the protagonist of a traditional English ‘silver spoon’ novel. ‘We were knights then, barons since Agincourt, the larger honours came with the Georges. They came the last and they’ll go the first; the barony goes on.’* One can hear the family pride of Lord Beauchamp in Lord Marchmain’s deathbed speech, but, with the Lygons as with the Marchmains, the ultimate irony is that the barony does not go on. Bridey and Beryl are childless, as Lord Marchmain reminds the reader in the marvellous phrase ‘why should that uncouth pair sit here childless while the place crumbles about their ears?’ It is hard not to think of Elmley and Mona, even to wonder whether Maimie told Evelyn the family story that Boom’s last words to his beloved David Smyth, as he lay on his deathbed in Manhattan, were: ‘Must we dine with the Elmleys tonight?’
The fountain is abandoned and vandalised; it is the faith that endures. Though Lord Beauchamp had seven children, there was no one to take the title to his grandchildren’s generation. Hugh and Elmley and three of the sisters died childless. Only Lettice and Richard had issue – and both Richard’s children were girls. The Earldom of Beauchamp is now extinct.
* * *
* Waugh revised the text of Brideshead on several occasions. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from the first mass-market edition of 1945.
* This was altered
by Waugh in proof. In the original manuscript Blanche speaks of Marchmain ‘indulging in what my step-father calls ‘‘English habits’’’ – a clear allusion to the purported English predilection for homosexuality.
* Maimie herself was spared from reading this passage in precisely this form: in the version she was sent in 1944, ‘the scandal of her father’ is mentioned as a reason for her not making a royal match, but it is secondary to the ‘much blacker taint’ of Julia’s Catholicism.
* Like Dickie Lygon.
* Remarkably, but typically of the relationship with Maimie, immediately after this heartfelt passage of the letter Evelyn changed the subject to a recently published memoir by Diana Cooper in which ‘She plainly accuses Alfred [Hubert Duggan’s brother] and me of buggery.’
* Wording in this quotation follows Waugh’s revised text of 1960.
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The Waugh Generation: Sarah O’Reilly talks to Paula Byrne
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Sarah O’Reilly talks to Paula Byrne
You reveal that to write, Waugh often escaped to the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford, explaining in a letter to Maimie and Coote Lygon ‘the trouble about poor Bo is that he’s a lazy bugger and if he was in a house with you lovely girls he would just sit about and chatter and get d.d.[disgustingly drunk] and ride a horse and have a heavenly time but would he write his book? No …’ What distractions do you try to escape from when writing, and where do you go to escape them?
