Books: Fierce Little Tragedy

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED—Evelyn Waugh—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Early one morning in 1944, a flight of German dive bombers swooshed down on the headquarters of the British Military Mission to Yugoslavia. Sane Britons dashed for the slit trenches. At that moment, there appeared on a hilltop, in full view of the enemy, and dressed (as a further aid to marksmanship) in a white coat, an unruffled British officer. He was Royal Horse Guards Captain Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (rhymes with awe), whose seventh novel is the Book-of-the-Month Club’s January choice.

Waugh’s comrades-in-arms were not favorably impressed by his nonchalance: they expected him to draw enemy bombs. His good friend and commanding officer Major Randolph Churchill (an old-style aristocrat who now writes a column for United Feature Syndicate) cried something to the effect that this was not the Battle of Agincourt. Waugh forsook his lonely eminence, in icy rage removed his coat. “It was not your rudeness I minded,” he explained to Major Churchill, “it was your cowardice that surprised me.”

Brideshead Revisited is a by-product of Waugh’s military career. He wrote the 351-page novel while nursing a foot broken in a parachute jump. To many U.S. readers this book will be their first exposure to one of the wittiest, most corrosively mocking and violently serious minds now writing English prose—a mind whose career is almost as exciting as the books it has produced.

The Author. At 24, Evelyn Waugh proclaimed his unflagging aversion to 20th Century technological civilization in a learned, nostalgic study of those 19th Century enemies of technology, the Pre-Raphaelites (Rossetti: His Life and Works). His dislike of the modern world and his satiric discernment of the kind of people who run and ruin it became grim in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, two wickedly witty and iridescent novels which skewered a refined rogues’ gallery of Mayfair cads and bounders. Most critics found these novels much too funny to be taken seriously. But in 1930, Waugh astonished London’s literati by becoming a Roman Catholic. He crowned his conversion with a most unfunny biography of the English Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, and with his most glacially sardonic novel, A Handful of Dust (TIME, Sept. 24, 1934), a satire on aimless decay and aimless viciousness in the patriciate. Later came Put Out More Flags, a hilariously mordant comedy about Britain’s Wrorld War II bureaucrats and racketeers.

At 42, Author Waugh lives in an old Gloucestershire manor house with his (second) wife, and four children whom he affects to detest. He is a connoisseur of wines and cigars, wears a bowler, takes the air swinging an old-fashioned cane. He cannot drive a car, shuns the telephone, barely accepts a telegram. Sighs his go-ahead friend Randolph Churchill: “He becomes more old-fashioned . . . every day. His favorite novelist is Trollope. . . . He seeks to live in an oasis.”

The Novel. Brideshead Revisited is a tragicomedy of Britain between World Wars I & II. Like its author’s life, it opens with mockery, ends in religious dedication. Half of it glitters with wit, the other half is rigorously solemn. Some of the writing matches Waugh’s best (and there is little better); some of it is equal to his worst (sample: “. . . at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. … On the rough water … I was made free of her narrow loins.”). Those who believe that Author Waugh makes real sense only when he is writing apparent nonsense are likely to be dismayed by the book’s religious implications—just as Waugh’s more devout co-religionists may be troubled by some of its ripe frivolity.

The hero of Brideshead Revisited is Charles Ryder, an architectural painter. When young Charles became an Oxford undergraduate in the golden age (circa 1921), life still flowed unruffled in Oxford.

Sundays, the old city appeared at its most venerable. “None but churchgoers seemed abroad . . . undergraduates and graduates and wives and tradespeople, walking with that unmistakable English church-going pace . . . holding, bound in black lambskin and white celluloid, the liturgies of half a dozen conflicting sects; on their way to St. Barnabas, St. Columba, St. Aloysius, St. Mary’s, Pusey House. Blackfriars … all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race. Four proud infidels alone proclaimed their dissent: four Indians from the gates of Balliol, in freshly laundered white flannels and neatly pressed blazers, with snow-white turbans on their heads, and in their plump, brown hands bright cushions, a picnic basket and the Unpleasant Plays of Bernard Shaw. . . .”

Insane Orderliness. The most arresting figure in this tranquil scene was young Lord Sebastian Flyte. Hero Ryder, who had ground-floor rooms, met Sebastian somewhat unpropitiously one night. Amid the hubbub of strayed revellers he heard one voice say distinctly: “D’you know I feel most unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute.” “And there appeared at my window,” says Ryder, who narrates the novel in the first person, “the face I knew to be Sebastian’s—but not as I had formerly seen it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick. . . . There was … a kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian’s choice, in his extremity, of an open window.” The episode ended in the deathless friendship of Sebastian and Ryder, solemnized at a luncheon of plovers’ eggs and lobster Newburg.

Ryder’s dignified cousin Jasper, who was in his fourth year, was bitter. “I expected you,” said he, coldly fixing his eyes on a human skull resting in a bowl of roses, “to make some mistakes your first year. We all do. I got in with some thoroughly objectionable . . . men who ran a mission to hop-pickers in the long vac. But you, my dear Charles . . . have gone straight hook, line and sinker, into the very worst set in the University. . . . There’s that chap Sebastian Flyte you seem inseparable from. . . . [He] looks odd to me. … Of course, they’re an odd family.”

Just how odd they were Ryder was finding out for himself. Sebastian’s father, Lord Marchmain, lived in Italy with an Italian mistress. His wife lived in Venice with a gentleman poet. “. . . Always drifting about the canals in a gondola with [him],” exclaimed Anthony Blanche, who was as “ageless as a lizard” and knew the family well “—such attitudes, my dear, like Madame Recamier; once, I passed them, and [the] gondolier . . . gave me such a wink. . . . She sucks [men’s] blood. You can see the toothmarks all over Adrian’s . . . shoulders when he is bathing.”

Sebastian’s older brother, Lord Brideshead, was an avid collector of matchboxes. Sebastian’s sister, Julia, was like a “Renaissance tragedy. . . . Dogs and children love her . . . my dear, she’s a fiend. . . . There ought to be an Inquisition especially set up to burn her.”

Sip, Sip, Sip. Young Ryder was not surprised when beautiful Lady Julia made noises like “a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality” and became engaged to a rich Canadian, who gave her a tortoise with her initials set in diamonds on its shell. He was not surprised when his good friend Sebastian took to drinking on the sly. “My dear, such a sot,” said Anthony Blanche. “Sip sip, sip like a dowager, all day.” But when Ryder visited Brideshead, the magnificent family mansion, he was astonished to find that “religion predominated in the house,” that the family diversified its sins with daily mass and rosaries.

“We must make a Catholic of Charles,” said Lady Marchmain in a matter-of-fact way. Ryder thought it was all the most shocking hypocrisy—especially when his drunken friend Sebastian fled desperately to North Africa and took up with the most squalid society he could find.

With this episode, in a break as abrupt and final as that of Britain from peace to war, Novelist Waugh begins the more obviously earnest part of his book. “My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of wartime. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. . . . These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.”

Slowly, Ryder, now a successful artist, forgot the family at Brideshead. When the Depression blanketed England, Ryder became the last consolation of Britain’s dying aristocracy. “I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom.”

Playing Tigers. As Englishmen entered into “the last decade of their grandeur,” Artist Ryder, with no faith to cling to, desperately sought to recapture his artistic vitality by painting in the Latin American jungles. Result: he became a bigger social success. “Mr. Ryder,” the best critics agreed (in one of Waugh’s inimitable parodies of claptrap), “rises like a young trout to the hypodermic injection of a new culture . . . focussing the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism. . . . Mr. Ryder has. found himself.” But Anthony Blanche could not be fooled.

Ryder made a last desperate snatch at life by falling in love with Lady Julia; lawyers coldly set in motion the legal wheels of divorce that would enable them to marry. But Brideshead revisited, Ryder found, was in as desperate a state as the rest of England. The chapel was closed. Lady Marchmain was dead. Lord Brideshead was married to the widow of an admiral who had also collected matchboxes. Charming Sebastian had wound up as sottish handyman to a kindly abbot in a Spanish monastery. And on the eve of World War II, wicked old Lord Marchmain himself came home to England to die. Propped up in a massive Renaissance bed, his Italian mistress and an oxygen cylinder beside him, he rambled in & out of delirium :

“… Better today. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately . . . drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets. I shall live long. . . . If I could only breathe. . . . Plender, Gaston, open the windows.” “The windows are all wide open, my lord,” said the valets.

They sent for a priest. Lord Marchmain threw him out. “Give him time,” said the priest cheerfully, “I’ve known worse cases make beautiful deaths.”

How the priest was proved right is the climax to Brideshead Revisited, in which the ageless theme of rebirth through death is used melodramatically by Author Waugh to resurrect the remnants of the tottering family and leave Artist Ryder sadder, wiser, still unmarried to Lady Julia—and a religious man. Soon after, Ryder, now a soldier, watched troops being billeted at Brideshead.

“The builders [of Brideshead] did not know the uses to which their work would descend. . . . Something quite remote from anything [they] intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame . . . relit before the . . . doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”