Thursday, December 8, 2011

Brideshead Revisited (the Series) part one

So that's China from me. Now I realise I'm two short of 200 posts so I'll fill in two posts just for the sake of getting to that (200) milestone. This one is notes I've made on why this series (based on a great novel) is such a masterpiece. Many of the notes are inspired by a great literary biography of Evelyn Waugh, Mad World, which has that novel at its centre.

The novel was subtitled “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder” and that dualism of the sacred and profane is at the heart of the novel and the series. Waugh evidently wants his reader to prefer what is sacred while at the same time he never denies the pull of the profane. So here are the notes over two posts (divided according to the divisions in the series that from memory somewhat correspond with the chapters in the novel).


Chapter 1 - Et in Arcadia Ego
This heading (combined with the main heading) sets up the story as a history of an exit from (and then return to) some Eden.
Charles Ryder is in the army during WWII when he is stationed at a great house called Brideshead. Memories of his first visits there and his time at Oxford in the 1920s come flooding back. He had met the younger son (Sebastian Flyte) of the owner of Brideshead at Oxford. Flyte had in turn introduced him to the aesthete movement there (after he had already been there for at least a term mixing with a rather dour and dryly intellectual crowd) and eventually gone on to visit the house.
(Much more can be said concerning how Seb (my abbreviation only) and his group debauched Charles and the parallel with Evelyn’s own Oxford life and his several years in the thrall with the Lygon boys (Hugh, in particular, was the model for Sebastian – his older brother in the novel was clearly based somewhat on Hugh’s older brother) and their mostly old Etonian aesthete crowd (including two especial models for the (in)famous Anthony Blanche). I’ll just say here that the novel begins to reveal that there are two competing visions of Eden: a material aesthetic one and a spiritual one of material self-denial delivered by grace that requires a material death of a kind and that he is yet to understand.)
The first visit was to ‘nanny’ in an otherwise virtually empty house (except for a few servants, I presume). Contrasted with this new glamour for Charles is life upon his return to stay with his middle class father in Bayswater, London. After Sebastian injures himself during the vacation he calls on Charles who comes running back to the beautiful old house. There he meets Seb’s sister Julia (clearly based on Mary Lygon) for the first time and spends the summer aiding Seb in his recuperation. Nothing of the kind of these events ever happened between Hugh Lygon and Evelyn while Hugh was at Oxford with Waugh – Waugh was an Oxford pal only and never deemed suited to visit the great house in those years.


Chapter 2 - Home and Abroad
This is a rather innocuous heading but the abroad part (while still bearing a glamour for Charles) is also an indicator of exile. The main character turns out to be not Sebastian but actually the whole Marchmain family. The head of the family is in actual exile in Venice (based on the actual exile from England of the Lygon patriarch, Earl Beauchamp). He is the main character theologically speaking in this unashamedly theological novel so to note that there is a sort of masked exile here is to recognise the final theological point being made. More on that as the commentary proceeds.
This chapter further draws us in to notice the material nature of the aesthetic idyll of great houses and Oxford friendships and aestheticism by means of that summer at Brideshead with Seb and Julia. Charles also meet the older brother known only as Bridey in the novel (presumably his courtesy title as heir to the Marquis Marchmain was a lesser title that would have seen him referred to formally as Lord Brideshead – Hugh’s older brother also went by Lord Elmley for similar reasons although his father was an earl rather than a marquis) and a younger sister, the adorable and pious Cordelia (also based on an equally adorable younger Lygon sister), and the staff. Incidentally the family is Roman Catholic and ultimately inspired Charles’s conversion late in the novel but the family they were based on were Anglo-Catholic – Waugh himself became RC via a different route than this family albeit that he came to be as close with them as Charles came to be with the Flytes.
The visit with Seb’s dad Lord Marchmain in Venice and his mistress reveals more of the life of the aesthete and more great architecture and art (Charles is an aspiring (and putatively atheist) painter just as Evelyn too was an aspiring (literary) artist (but more likely agnostic in his early years)). The real Lord Beauchamp (father of the Lygons and the model for Marchmain, father of the Flytes) was apparently more interested in rent-boy gondoliers and servants rather than mistresses and ranged around Europe frequently summering in Australia but he truly was in exile from England between the wars (for the very reason of his sexual preferences).
Charles then drops off Seb at the family’s London townhouse Marchmain House (that they call Marchers just as the Flyte family called their London townhouse Halkyn House Halkers) and spent the final days before term commenced back at Bayswater with his own dad. Incidentally the main Flyte house that Evelyn came to know (besides Halkyn) was in Worcestershire and was called Madresfield Court (known to the family as Mad) but they also stayed annually (when he lived in England) at Walmer Castle at Deal in Kent that Earl Beauchamp also possessed in his capacity as Lord Warden and Admiral of the Cinque Ports from 1913 as his ceremonial duties dictated.
Chapter 3 - The Bleak Light of Day
Here we are back to reflecting upon the Eden of Oxford and its aestheticism juxtaposed against the reality beyond (taught to us now via Sebastian).
Seb is now being supervised at uni by Mr Samgrass, a ‘tame Don’ of Seb’s mother (due to alleged irregular performance of various kinds). Evelyn also had several models of such Dons to choose from. We thus learn that his mother likes a little bit of meddling (but isn't that a bit like God).
This may not have happened to Hugh Lygon but again the characters of the real and fictional mothers are eerily similar. Both were extremely pious and both were in the end in conflict with their spouses (and most of their children mainly because of the conflict with their spouses and their piety) but not their own natal families. According to Wikipedia, Charles also gets a visit from Lady Marchmain to implore him to be a good influence upon her son (and perhaps judge whether she might be able to enlist him in a little bit of spying for her, too).
We also meet Rex, a suitor of Julia’s who later becomes a minister in the wartime government, when he and Julia visit Seb and Charles at Oxford. A minister friend of Evelyn’s is a good model for Rex. Julia is to be in town for her ‘coming out’ (hosted by her mother at Marchers) and invites the boys with hilarious results. After leaving Marchers, deciding to skip the respectable coming out ball before it has really begun and attending a somewhat seedy nightclub (Ma Mayfield’s ‘Old Hundredth’ at 100 Sink Street – apparently there is no such address but there certainly were somewhat seedy nightclubs popular with ‘gentlemen’ in 1920s Soho in London) with ‘Boy’ Mulcaster (Lord Mulcaster to us, an Eton contemporary of Seb’s – Evelyn would have come into contact with any number of models for ‘Boy’), the boys drive drunk in search of another club, cause some damage and get arrested.
Rex is called and does well at smoothing things over with the police (while ‘Boy’ seems to be doing his best to have the opposite effect) but as Seb was driving he gets into the most trouble and it becomes big news. Samgrass assists in court as a character witness at the same time gaining himself some leverage over the family (and over Seb). I guess you could say Rex was playing a similar game giving himself a shot with Julia. The judge accepts the Don’s disingenuous suggestion that Seb is ‘unused to wine’ and is quite lenient. The audience of course is in on the fairly open secret among those in the know that Seb is well used to wine (as he and other Eton/Oxford aesthetes are also well known to be ‘used to wine’ (along with other 'pleasures')).
Charles and Rex (I think) get invites to the Christmas hunt and both attend (I’m sure at least Charles did). Back at Oxford later, life is bleaker still for Seb as he now has more supervision than ever from Samgrass (now along with senior local RC clergy, I think) and he begins drinking sullenly for the first time. His idyll is over and Charles appears worried that the supervision is the main problem.
Chapter 4 - Sebastian Against the World
More stress upon the reality beyond here.
At Easter at Brideshead Charles notices for the first time that Seb has been drinking alone a lot and is becoming an abusive drunk. Cordy (Cordelia – my abbreviation) notices too and childishly dobs to Lady Marchmain who we see at home here for the first time. The Marchioness represents the world beyond aestheticism, I guess. Most of the family go off to the chapel to pray (leaving Charles, Julia and Seb). Seb apologises to Charles for having abused him but it appears to Charles that he had better skedaddle off to Bayswater which he soon does (with a biography of Lady Marchmain’s brother Ned signed by Lady Marchmain – this kind of thing eats away at Seb making him think Charles might be becoming a spy for Lady Marchmain but Charles assures him that won’t happen).
Back at Oxford the boys are hoping for ‘digs’ of their own on Merton Street but Seb fears he may end up being forced to live with Monsignor Bell. Another Seb accident after a visit from ‘mummy’ seals the deal for his mother (and possibly Oxford authorities) and Seb chooses to go down rather than face the choice of being sent down or living with the Bellmeister.
Oxford in those times for Seb’s class wasn’t always really about getting a degree and then going on to any specially demanding profession – it was about growing up a bit with a bit of distance from one’s family. Younger sons didn’t really have the prospect of being able to run a manor but they didn’t really have to worry too much about earning a crust either. They could be supported from their older brother’s family estate, I guess. In this regard, Evelyn would also have encountered a fair few models for Sebastian.
Charles returns to Bayswater following a lonely term without Seb going down from Oxford himself and on to an art school in Paris (Waugh also went down although he may have graduated first (with a ‘3rd’, I think)). He didn’t see Seb for a year but he reads in a letter from Lady Marchmain that he’s gone to West Asia under the supervision of Samgrass.
Chapter 5 - A Blow Upon a Bruise
This is a meditation upon the 'joys' of friendship when the love is tested.
Charles returns to Brideshead having been invited to New Year’s celebrations and Seb is back from the Levant with the ‘grass. Samgrass can’t produce any pictures with Seb in them claiming he was always holding the camera. It’s clear to Charles and probably others that Seb has escaped from Samgrass’s supervision at various times to go off on binges.
In discussions of Seb’s ongoing issues, Rex proposes he be sent to a successful sanatorium or doctor he knows of in Zurich that treats alcoholism (and interestingly, for some interpreters of the novel, sexual issues, since the model father and son for the father and son having most problems in the novel were apparently both what we would now call gay or at least apparently predominantly of that persuasion).
There is something of a dramatic scene for Charles at the house during which Lady Marchmain sends Charles away with some resounding fleas in his ear after learning he had given Seb drinking money while on the hunt and thus away from close supervision (along the lines of asking what did the family ever do to make him hate them so and that he and/or his actions were ‘callously wicked’ and ‘wantonly cruel’). He presumably expects never to return to that house or have anything further to do with that family (that isn’t to be the case, however, as we shall soon see).
Lady Marchmain later sends a letter of apology (I think) that fails to move Charles.

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