“The Ancient Lore” of Brideshead Revisited
It’s not just about nostalgia for youth. It’s about balancing loves from the past, present and future.
*spoilers, obviously
Nearly all commentary on Brideshead over the years has focused on the backdrop of Catholicism in the novel; the by-gone era of the English aristocracy; the homosexuality of Sebastian Flyte; the presence or lack of this in Charles Ryder, and nostalgia for the salad days of youth. As the full title of the novel suggests, “The Sacred and Profane Memories”. The story quite deliberately ends when Charles is about to turn forty years old.
“Here, at the age of thirty-nine, I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o'clock news”.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. But Charles sees it as such, as he remarks wistfully, “…as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died…”
You need to maintain “the ancient lore” felt from the past, but it is found in the new things in the present and the future.
Possibly because of the era in which I was born, the central theme of the novel never appeared to me to be the waning of Catholic influence in England, nor the struggles of those Catholic families, nor a by-gone time before television, computer and cell phone screens, when ladies and men wore extravagant hats and asked each other if they were “dining out”, and the delights of jazz clubs when that was the radical new music, although the latter nevertheless was one of the primary attractions of the book. To me, especially upon a second reading as one burrowed one’s way through one’s twenties, the central theme is that of a warning to those in their twenties and thirties, especially as they approach their fortieth birthday, like Charles Ryder is, when we meet him for the first time. Brideshead Revisited is a warning that, as one gets older, one must maintain past, present and future in equal measure in order to grow older successfully. One must keep one’s passions and great memories, but one must move forward and leave the past behind: otherwise, by trying to obtain what one had, or missed out on in one’s adolescence and young adulthood, one will decay in his thirties and forties and destroy the things he loves, as Oscar Wilde put it. And equally, one must maintain the sense of wonder, affection and joy that one usually experiences in one’s youth – “the ancient lore which I acquired that term” that “will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour”, as Charles puts it – as one moves forward in life, to ensure that equally, one doesn’t destroy the things he loves in his thirties and forties. You need to maintain “the ancient lore” felt from the past, but it is found in the new things in the present and the future. Although this can be gotten from nostalgia, as Bertolt Brecht once said, don’t start with the good old things, start with the bad new things. It is this that the novel should, and probably will, be read for over the coming century while many of its contemporary works of fiction are relegated to specialist literary dons, if they even manage to obtain that honor, more than its depictions of 1920s England, treatment of central Catholic themes or the waning of Catholic institutions in England.
This piece of wisdom that many young adults learn the hard way, and some adults never learn, is displayed in nearly every character in the book, but especially the two central characters. One of the most attractive qualities of the work is that the one main character is really a Gemini-pairing of two who act as the primary protagonists, Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte, fulfilling the roles that the other could have done. If you haven’t read the book or seen the series, the story begins, chronologically, with the two central characters falling in love during their first year at Oxford, romantically, platonically, with the joys of being young, with the adventure of frolicking, with friends, and most of all with each other. Both drop out of Oxford, however, and follow different paths, with Sebastian becoming an alcoholic recluse who leaves England, blowing all the potential of his youth, and maintaining only limited contact with his family, mainly just to retain his allowance that permits him to avoid finding work. Charles, on the other hand, fulfills the role essentially of an adopted son to Sebastian’s family, the Flytes, who live at Brideshead Castle: to his mother, Lady Marchmain; his older sister, Julia; his younger sister, Cordilia, and his elder brother, Brideshead, or ‘Bridey’, whose Christian name is never revealed. It is hard to not feel from the pages the wish, certainly from Sebastian’s mother, that Charles were her son, rather than the erratic and undependable Sebastian.
Sebastian cleans himself up a bit later in the book, when he is seen and heard from, but nevertheless cannot kick his alcoholism and is treated as a lost cause. Charles ends up leaving Brideshead and the Flyte family behind as he gets married and focuses on his career as an architectural painter. However, after a half-decade or more of this, he reunites and falls in love with Sebastian’s sister, who was a romantic interest when he was an undergraduate, despite having now reached his thirties, and has already established a family and successful career. Charles’ pursuit of Julia is the principal example shown in the second half of the book that one must retain one’s passions from adolescence and early adulthood, but that one cannot abandon the present and future chasing something from the past. This relationship with Julia, and the reconnection it allows Charles with Brideshead and to some extent the spirit of Sebastian, gives him a rebirth in his thirties. It gives him the feeling of “the ancient lore” of love and passion, but it is also an unsuccessful relationship as Julia is self-destructive, like Sebastian. For a while it provides him all the wonderful love that he felt years ago, but it is also a roll of the dice that comes up snake eyes and fritters away all of the chips he had built until that point, and, at his age, cannot rebuild, taking all of “the ancient lore” with it. In the beginning of the novel, “the ancient lore” is shown most vividly for the reader when Charles and Sebastian enjoy strawberries and wine “on a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms”, light “fat, Turkish cigarettes” and lie down under the shade. To conclude the scene, Sebastian remarks that this is "just the place to bury a crock of gold… I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember." Here, though, there is an element of misunderstanding that minimizes, or even dismisses completely, that one’s passions and loves can be taken into the future and new ones can be found.
Charles could have been Sebastian, had he not given up certain vices. He admits that he didn’t experience a good childhood, and we learn that his mother passed away when he was still a boy, serving as a nurse in the war, and his father is emotionally distant. He remarks that his indulgences in the first few years with Sebastian, the ‘toys’ of “silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins”, gave him “a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood”. However, as he says, it is a brief spell. Charles drinks, but only, as he narrates, “in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it”. As he says to his cousin, Jasper, when confronted about his behavior during his first year, “I happen to like this bad set. I like getting drunk at luncheon, and though I haven't yet spent quite double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall before the end of term”. But he knows that he didn’t allow this to undo him, as he narrates years later that he would have said the same thing to his cousin, if he could do so again, and would do so in even stronger terms. When he meets Sebastian’s family, they provide him the family he never had. And he, the child that Sebastian could have been to them, but wasn’t. But when Sebastian’s mother wishes for Charles to act in a way that he feels would be a betrayal of Sebastian, he is faithful to his friend over his friend’s family. His brush with possible self-destruction is when he decides to drop out of Oxford without finishing his undergraduate degree when Sebastian does as well. However, because Charles does this for good reasons, as opposed to Sebastian, who drops out because he doesn’t wish to grow up, find an occupation and take self-responsibility, Charles succeeds in his decision to become a painter, a tough career choice financially. As the first half of the book concludes, Charles has established himself as an artist living in Paris – a new setting, self-sufficient, and not clinging on to his schooldays or hometown.
Charles is what Sebastian could have been, had he found something to help his life move forward and not given in to his vices. When we first meet him, he is always looking back to his past, wishing to prolong it – his constant companion is the charming, although somewhat pathetic Aloysius the teddy bear. The only member of his family that he desires Charles meet is the only one whom he doesn’t speak ill of, Nanny Hawkins, who spends the novel as a kind of Mother Mary figure, always present in the background, never leaving Brideshead, not even her room, during all the years of change at Brideshead, as someone any of the characters can come back to for solace, if they so wish. Sebastian is all fun, but no responsibility. This is revealed most by the individual himself when he states that he “should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember." Here, not yet even twenty, he already sees the future – specifically getting older – as predeterminedly negative. He sees being older as miserable, and appears relegated to this. This is also shown from an outside perspective in someone who has know him for a long time, his old schoolmate Anthony Blanche, who attempts to warn Charles about Sebastian’s influence upon him.
“Have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have remembered for five minutes…? Conversation, as I know it, is like juggling; up go the balls and the balloons and the plates, up and over, in and out, spinning and leaping, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsuds drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then--phut!--vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing”.
Blanche attributes most of this to Sebastian’s mother, Lady Marchmain, who is a pious Catholic. When we see her in the book, she doesn’t appear to be abusive, but, as Blanche describes it, she keeps her children and a few other acquaintances as “a small gang of enslaved and emaciated prisoners for her exclusive enjoyment” at Brideshead. “She sucks their blood.” We never find Lady Marchmain shouting at her family, nor scolding them particularly, but the way through which her influence has affected Sebastian, as well as her other children, is her religion. This is seen not so much in paragraphs of Lady Marchmain sermonizing, which are called Mummy’s ‘Little Talks’, but in her children’s attendance of mass and love of their chapel, and what Charles describes as religion ‘predominating’ the house. The indication is that Sebastian’s depression, that he self-medicates with alcohol and his carefree attitude, comes from guilt over sins. Although he doesn’t say explicitly what these are, they appear to be the sin of being a human that experiences desires and sinful thoughts, as well as his homosexual tendencies.
Waugh could have made the point clearer – as a Catholic, it might have been such a deeply-held idea to him that he might have assumed most readers would feel it strongly – but additionally, Sebastian’s family believe that suffering is righteous. As Charles says, “it seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man”, to which Sebastian’s elder brother Brideshead replies "it's arguable". Aside from his self-destructive behavior, Sebastian doesn’t admit feeling burdened by the guilt of sin, like Julia does, although, as Blanche says, “he and I were both Catholics, so we used to go to mass together. He used to spend such a time in the confessional, I used to wonder what he had to say, because he never did anything wrong; never quite; at least, he never got punished”. Sebastian must desperately move forward, but he is dragged back by the guilt of sin. Paradoxically, though, this Catholicism is what keeps him going later on. His sister Cordelia even goes as far as to label Sebastian as ‘holy’, saying that the fathers at the missionary house he frequents as a buffer between his periods of drinking recognize this in him, even though Charles is taken aback by this honorific. Bridey remarks earlier in the story that he believes “God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people”. Although bemusing to Charles, this is a normal way of seeing things for the Flytes.
Aside from his alcoholism, one of the major moments where he embraces his destruction is when, in his sophomore year at Oxford, he crashes a car while inebriated. This could have been a personal catastrophe, but he has a guardian angel looking down on him. He is bailed out by two people he dislikes, and this increases his dislike for them, rather than inculcating a sense of gratitude and respect: his sister’s partner, the older Rex Mottram, who, being worldly and a mover in high places, smooths things over with the police and pays the boys’ bail. Then, in court, the oleaginous and creepy history don, Samgrass, happily lies to the judge by providing a character testimony that he knows to be false, claiming Sebastian to be a most studious and promising student, who was “unused to wine”. Although it’s never clear exactly why, it appears that he does this to toady up to Sebastian’s mother, possibly hoping to get into her bank account, her knickers, or both. It is a point that is often overlooked in discussions of Brideshead and the character of Sebastian Flyte, but it is a key turning point in the novel and his life. That he has been dependent upon these characters he detests clearly grates at him, and instead of learning a valuable lesson from the incident, he slides further into his alcohol. He is chasing “the ancient lore” in the past and present, but unlike Charles, isn’t setting it up for the future.
Part of this balancing of the loves of past, present and future is that you need to accept certain things, if they’re good for you, even if they are a bitter pill to swallow. This is Charles’ undoing. In the second part of the book, Charles turns into Sebastian by destroying his family and career. As the novel ends, although not as badly as Sebastian, he has lost self-belief and knows that he has thrown away the best things that, at thirty-nine, he had created in his life up until that point. Charles does not have “the ancient lore” with him in the present, and he lost it by chasing back into the past to try to find it, rather than having maintained it in the present and preparations for the future. Instead of being at middle-age, delighted by all he has done but also currently possesses and can enjoy in the future, he is now, at middle-age, feeling destitute, asking questions such as “how could I help them who could so little help myself?” He and Hooper, the young soldier who is under his command and has taken the place that Sebastian and Charles had once held as the loveable youth who is full of potential and has this challenge of growing old successfully before him, like they did, stand before Brideshead Castle. Hooper remarks that it is far too large for just one family, to which Charles says that Brideshead was not built to be occupied, but to provide some other, special purpose. The hint that Waugh wanted the reader to draw here probably being “the ancient lore” which Charles “acquired that term”. As he continues, “perhaps that's one of the pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he'll grow up. I don't know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my son grow up. I'm homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless”. At the time he gives these up, he is searching for “the ancient lore”, but here is now admitting, or at least might be beginning to understand, that “the ancient lore” is found again in new pursuits, building a home, parenthood, the act of creation, and the relationships one develops, as well as nostalgia.
Waugh doesn’t give us a paper tiger to battle. Charles is given possibly the strongest reason one could have to go running back to his past and pursue Julia, although this ends up with him losing those things he had worked so hard to obtain during his twenties. When we leave the first half of the story, Charles has been training to be a painter and has started to make a career out of it; in the second half of the novel, we discover that Charles is now a celebrated architectural painter and is married to Celia, the sister of a university friend, one of the story’s most comical and loveable characters, the buffoonish, uncultured, yet somehow endearing Boy Mulcaster, with two children. Yet, he has fallen out of love with his wife, and consequently gone on a two-year version of the artist’s business trip, painting Central and South American landscapes, ostensibly because he wishes to escape his wife. This, in the age before instant messaging. This loss of passion is demonstrated in the exhibition of Ryder’s Latin America. When they reunite on the Trans-Atlantic ship where he also becomes reunited with Julia, who is in the same boat as him, both physically and metaphorically, as she doesn’t love her partner, either, we discover that his wife cheated on him. We don’t discover the details, but it appears to have destroyed Charles. He even says to Celia that he isn’t in love.
This is displayed in his work: Blanche is the last visitor to the opening exhibition of Ryder’s Latin America, which delights Charles. However, despite most other visitors enjoying the paintings, Blanche describes them as “tripe”, which Charles concedes. Blanche remarks to Charles that he had found Charles’ earlier work charming, but, consequently, not that interesting artistically. Like the “rainbow light for a second” of “soapsuds”, beautiful, temporarily, but of little substance; as opposed to art that is full of “good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them”, “spicy things”, as Blanche adds: something fresh, truthful, independent, unique, daring, adventurous. As Churchill once pronounced, if you’ve never made an enemy, you’ve never stood up for anything in your life. It’s the same in art. Blanche says that he had heard that Charles had
“…gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how my old heart leaped… "'Oh, the pictures,' they said; 'they're most peculiar.' 'Not at all what he usually does.' 'Very forceful.' 'Quite barbaric.' 'I call them downright unhealthy,' said Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander… "My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, 'Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures.'”
But Ryder’s Latin America reminds Blanche of
“…dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers... I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”
When I was younger I desperately wanted to understand the wisdom in these two key scenes, re-reading them many times and turning to them again, as I was certain there was some important sagacity contained in them, but I couldn’t understand why charm would be considered bad. Of course, what Blanche means is the attractive, but hollow, without substance. Despite being a painter of considerable talent, Charles says “I never built anything”; despite his skill, he has been painting architecture designed by others, and not saying anything too unique or challenging in his work. Likewise, as an artist, because he has lost “the ancient lore”, he has lost his unique artistic qualities, and the passions and individuality of the artist are lacking in his work.
Some of these outcomes are a result of circumstances out of his control: he is taken into the army because of the war, not because of his own choices. Nevertheless, when he enters the army, he has already lost his family, Julia, Sebastian, the Flyte family and Brideshead. Further, Charles’ marriage is not portrayed as completely loveless; Celia genuinely appears to regret what she did, and has been working very hard to raise their children and to nurture her husband’s career. She has prepared a new studio for him; says that he is always discussed by the children; has named their girl, Caroline, after Charles, and there is an underlying hint that she cheated on Charles after Charles became cold and loveless. She does all of the hobnobbing and networking for Charles for his exhibitions and essential press work that he plainly dislikes, and weeps when she realizes that Charles still doesn’t forgive or love her when he comes back.
During this time, while Charles is sowing the seeds that make him lose all his passions and loves by chasing one of them, Sebastian is somewhat on the up, managing to finally do something that perchance saves him from the grave, which, for him, is an achievement. Now living in Fez, he has found “the ancient lore” somewhat in the present and a potential future, as he has befriended the fellow dipsomaniac and it is hinted most likely also his lover, Kurt, a German nomad who shares with Sebastian a desire to live anywhere except where he came from. It is nowhere near as high a star as he could have flown to. But it has given him responsibility and a new relationship, which needed to replace those that would naturally be discontinued after moving to new stages in life. He admits this freely to Charles when Charles visits to inform him that his mother is dying, and wishes to see him again. Sebastian declines, saying that his health won’t let him, but this is also, in a way, a sign of positive independence from his past, as he doesn’t feel the need to go chasing things that were in the past and not coming back. Unlike Charles, Sebastian will not sacrifice the present and future to go chasing the past, as he remarks, when asked whether he would go back to England or Brideshead again, that “it would be lovely, in some ways… but do you think Kurt would like it?” He is taken to a clinic every so often because his health has taken such a battering from his alcohol abuse, but he appears to see a future. Kurt is pretty loathsome: rude, addicted, ungrateful to the servant. As Sebastian says to Charles, during his visit, “I won't ask you if you liked Kurt; no one does”. However, he adds that “it's funny – I couldn't get on without him, you know… it's rather a pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me." At this time, he has given up the teddy bear and Nanny Hawkins. Now he is acting as a Nanny Hawkins to someone he holds dear. As Charles concludes, Sebastian’s confession gave him “the key I lacked” to understanding why Sebastian won’t come back to Brideshead: “He’s found a companion he happens to like and a place where he happens to like living".
Charles leaves his wife for Julia, living again at Brideshead, “a place where he’s been happy”, but Julia is like Sebastian, and can’t continue the relationship that she sees as a sin between two divorcees. Equally, for his part, because Charles cannot accept Catholicism, although he describes himself as an agnostic rather than an atheist, this fundamental difference in values drives a wedge between both, certainly for Julia. They enjoy happy months together and plan to get married, each providing the other a feeling of nostalgia and continuity. However, Julia begins to doom the relationship of two divorcees as she sees it as sinful, and therefore will be something for which she will be punished. Similar to how her mother saw her subsequent relationships with men after her divorce from Julia’s father. Like with Charles and Julia, the atheism of Julia’s father and the Catholicism of her mother strained their relationship to the point of breaking. Julia downplays the sin she sees in the relationship at first, but this builds up slowly, especially after seeing her atheist father return to Brideshead and undergo a deathbed conversion, despite stating adamantly that he wouldn’t; and more importantly, when the issue reaches a climax within her after Bridey states coldly, candidly, and from his way of thinking, kindly, that he won’t bring his future wife to visit the house while Julia and Charles are living together, for they are living in sin. It is these qualities of the characters that have made many readers wonder how Waugh intended the book as a positive representation of Catholicism that might tempt people to convert to the faith. Though, naturally, had these characters been perfect and the influence of Catholicism upon them been stainless, many of these same readers would be disparaging him for apologetics.
Julia’s decision to break it off with Charles might baffle some readers, as it did a younger me when I first took pleasure in visiting the literary grounds of Brideshead. But we are given a warning about Julia earlier in the book when Blanche cautions Charles about Julia, although this warning is usually forgotten by most readers because he spends most of his time warning about Sebastian and his mother: Julia is “a fiend--a passionless, acquisitive, intriguing, ruthless killer. I wonder if she's incestuous. I doubt it; all she wants is power.” Charles probably doesn’t take heed not only because the Flyte family and Brideshead are so delightful, but because Blanche’s language seems a bit hyperbolic. And it probably is. Julia is passionate and playful, and it’s ridiculous to even suggest her being incestuous. But she kills “something… long sickening” in Charles, even though she had nurtured this within him. She does it her way, like her mother did to Sebastian.
You can, and should – need to – maintain “the ancient lore” as you get older. The point is that, as Charles says, it exists “in one shape or another”. Charles, for his part, won’t change by accepting Catholicism to keep Julia. Or, if the issue is so difficult for him, one has to ask why he attempts a relationship with someone who disagrees with him on such core values that the relationship has no future. The irony is that just before he is reunited with Julia, Celia asks Charles if he has changed or wants to change, to which he replies that change is “the only evidence of life”. Yet, immediately after, he runs backward, to Julia.
Sebastian’s progress is dashed when Kurt is forcibly taken back to Germany and commits suicide. Without Kurt, Sebastian is more aimless, and is refused into the mission he wishes to join, as they will not admit a drunkard. At the end of the story, both of Brideshead’s Gemini have reached middle age, and have lost not only their youth, but everything they had created. Still, Waugh provides hope for the characters: it is also worth noting that it is not stated for certain that Sebastian dies in the novel. Most of the time, readers conclude that he has either died, or will in the near future, when the novel ends, for he has already weakened himself and Cordelia says that she expects that “one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life”. However, after his visit to Morocco, Charles says to Brideshead that Sebastian is “weakening himself”, not “killing himself with drink". “He hasn't D.T.'s or cirrhosis", he adds. And although he hasn’t succeeded, he has a wish to be accepted as a missionary. And despite the war, having lost his family, passion for his work and Julia, in the last scene of the book, the self-described ‘agnostic’ makes the sign of the cross and mutters a prayer in the chapel at Brideshead upon his return. This is understood by many readers to be a mere formality or act of nostalgia by Charles. But, like many other readers over the years, I have always read it as a possible sign of a conversion. So maybe Julia could be won back. As Waugh, a practicing Catholic, apparently intended the book to show a Catholic reading of “the operation of divine Grace” – in other words, how God implements Grace upon humanity and uses this to call souls to the faith – it is hard for me to believe that Waugh didn’t mean for this to be the beginning of a conversion.
You should “bury something precious in every place where you've been happy” so you can “come back and dig it up and remember." But not when you’re “old and ugly and miserable”. When you’re old, but with new loves. You lose something if you don’t dig up nostalgic loves, but you shouldn’t be relying on them. Loves from the past help one move forward, but the events of the past must stay there, replaced by new events and challenges. “Here, at the age of thirty-nine, I began to be old” and “something within me, long sickening… quietly died”. Don’t make it you. Mr. Blanche and Mr. Ryder are entreating you.