Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

Douglas Lane Patey Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited Jugoslavia, autumn i 944. The tide ofWorld War II is turning, but the war is still bitterly fought. The evening sky over the tiny mountain town of Topusko is dotted with parachutes. A British airdrop: medicine and weapons for Tito and his Communist "Partisans," the group in Jugoslavia that Britain and theAllies, in a sudden change of policy, are supporting against the Germans. Stealing through the woods and mountain passes, Partisan troops collect the booty, keeping most of it, complaining that there isn't more. Grudgingly they turn over supplies specifically marked for the little British mission to its leader, Randolph Churchill—son ofthe Prime Minister—and to his second-in-command, Captain Evelyn Waugh, late of the Royal Marines. From the postbag, amidst orders and letters from home, emerges one bigger bundle: page proofs of a novel, one of the most powerful of our century. Later Waugh would write when giving them to Loyola College in Maryland in thanks for an honorary degree: This set ofpage-proofs was sent in October 1944 from Henrietta Street [his publishers] to ? o Downing Street; from there LOGOS 3:2 SPRING 2000 LOGOS it travelled to Italy in the Prime Minister's post bag, was flown from Brindisi & dropped by parachute in Croatia, then an isolated area of"resistance"; was corrected at Topusko & taken by jeep, when the road was temporarily cleared of enemy, to Split; there byjeep to Italy and so home, via Downing Street.' Brideshead Revisited did make it home, and when published in 194c, would prove the most popular book of Waugh's career, selling more than a million copies. There would be offers for movie rights, and a lavish all-expenses-paid trip from postwar England, still hobbled by rationing and shortages, to the fairyland of Hollywood. Then, when intellectuals had a chance to reflect, Brideshead would effectively destroy Waugh's literary reputation for a generation. Critics from Kingsley Amis in England to Edmund Wilson inAmerica , once admirers, competed in crafting dismissive insults. "It's bad taste to like Brideshead," opined one; the New Statesman announced: "In literary calendars, 194c is marked as the year Waugh ended."2 The book that provoked such varied and violent response contains the memoirs ofa serving soldier, Captain Charles Ryder. Time present—the setting ofthe novel's prologue and epilogue—is 1 942 . From the bleakness ofwartime, Ryder recollects his life in die 1 920s and '30s, recalling in lush language and lavish description the look, smells, and tastes ofa yearned-for world now vanished in the age of soya beans and Basic English. He turns first to his student days at Oxford in the '20s, when he fell in love with the beautiful Sebastian Flyte and came to know Sebastian's family at their country seat, Brideshead Castle. Then the '30s, when after an empty firstmarriage Ryder pursued an affair, adulterous on both sides, with Sebastian's sister Julia. Both these affairs foundered, and though they led, we discover , to Ryder's religious conversion, his life in retrospect seems a tragic succession of frustrations and loves lost. Only in the book's final pages does Ryder affirm a meaningful pattern, a redeeming design in his life. In his copy for the first-edition dustjacket, Waugh explained that he meant the novel to suggest "a hope, not indeed, EVELYN WAUGH S BRIDESHEAD REVISITED that anything but disaster lies ahead, but that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters." Until that final moment, the mood of the novel is one of overpowering sadness. Ryder describes himself as "homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless." Shunted pointlessly about among army transit camps, he finds that his "last love"—his commitment to the army, to the cause he is fighting for—"has died." [A]s I lay awake before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness. ... I was aghast to realize that something inside me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year ofmarriage, suddenly knew that he no longer had any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife. ... I knew it all, the whole...