Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

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Classics has remained at the forefront of my reading and academic work since my teenage

years, all the way through to university. As a result, I have always been drawn to and enjoyed

the texts and novels that are inspired by its tradition – everything from Milton’s Paradise

Lost and Shakespeare’s tragedies, through to Robert Harris’ novels about Cicero’s life,

Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (review of this book here). The broad scope of Evelyn Waugh’s fiction, specifically the tragedy and romance in Brideshead Revisited, seem to me to have derived, at least in part, from Waugh’s perception of a classical world that is at once idyllic but flawed. It is one of the few books that I go back to time and time again, forever finding joy in its timeless quality.

Brideshead Revisited is a book about beauty – a beautiful house, its glorious architecture and

contents, and the beguiling people within it. But it is also concerned with loss and the sins

that bring about its downfall. It is a story told in the context of the loss of the Garden of Eden;

in Waugh’s narrative, an illusory idyll created by man in the eyes of God. Both the opening

of the novel, and Waugh’s subsequent preface to a later edition (written in 1959, reflecting on

the book that he had written in 1944) evoke the decay and destruction of Brideshead and all

that it stands for. In the preface, he writes: “It was a bleak period of present privation and

threatening disaster…” Similarly, the Prologue summons up vistas of a desolate landscape; traditional English splendours lost in the horrors of war and modernity.

The loss of beauty in Waugh’s novel is manifested in the landscape, both physically and

metaphorically. The landscape of Brideshead is indeed a paradise lost, carved up by new

roads and sullied by the litter of retreating soldiers: “… those deposits of rubbish [that]… lay

under the dock and nettle among cigarette packets and empty tins.” Charles Ryder observes

this despoliation with weary melancholy; his soldier-servant, Hooper, who brings him news

of their arrival at the house, describes it as a “great barrack of a place”, with a “frightful”

fountain: “You never saw such a thing.” But the threat to Brideshead represents something

even more apocalyptic than a decaying mansion, surrounded by the detritus of army life. For

Charles Ryder – his name perhaps a suggestion of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse – his

arrival at houses such as Brideshead is a sign that their beauties “were soon to be deserted or

debased… a presage of doom.”

The tragedy of Brideshead Revisited is, at least in part, a bitter lesson that the innocence of a

first discovery of beauty can never be recreated, and a sharp reminder that after The Fall, all

beauty is an illusion, a pale shadow of what once was. Thus Charles’ youthful love of

Sebastian is in some sense destroyed by his dawning recognition of Julia’s beauty. When Sebastian’s sister is described for the first time by Antony Blanche – the latter an

astute observer of several unavoidable truths in the novel, much like Ovid’s Teiresias in

Metamorphoses – we discover that she shares a certain kind of surface perfection with her

brother: “And Julia, you know what she looks like… A face of flawless Florentine

quattrocento beauty…” Waugh then goes on to suggest the ability of beauty to dictate the

path of peoples’ lives: “almost anyone else with those looks would have been tempted to

become artistic…” But Blanche’s depiction of Julia cannot be as pure as his name suggests,

when he tries to blacken her beauty with sin, and find a flaw in her impeccable charm: “I

wonder if she’s incestuous.” This vulgar statement is an indication that in a post-lapsarian

world, there must always be a worm eating away at the heart of beauty.

A modern reading of Waugh may be more alert to the intriguing subtleties of the narrative,

and our own uncertainties about religion are at once both illuminating and obscuring when

considering more straightforwardly devout or classical texts. Yet the links between beauty and sin in Brideshead Revisited are so compelling that they remain as potent now as they

were at the time of writing, with a fascinating interplay between surface and depths, darkness

and light.

© The Stars Come Out To Play. Matthew Goode, Hayley Atwell, and Ben Whishaw in the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, directed by Julian Jarrold.