Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Chapman and Hall, London 1945. 12/25; F.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

• DH Lawrence

Daniel Handler disagrees. He tells us literature is created by somebody and as a creature carries the fingerprints of the imagination and mind that made it.

Evelyn Waugh’s reputation as a great writer is supported by Brideshead Revisited, his most famous novel. The story like a lot of long fiction is vaguely autobiographical (this one ends in a conversion to Catholicism like Waugh had). Reading published descriptions of his life could have let me by thinking of Lawrence’s quote appreciate the book, and forget the author’s self-absorbed nasty character. Still try as I might I don’t agree with the general opinion of Brideshead. There are luminescent scenes and complicated characters that are alive. But in the end the novel is imprinted with Waugh’s personality. I’m with Handler on this one.

Waugh attended Oxford but was preoccupied with social climbing and alcohol to the point where he didn’t graduate. Although considered courageous in World War II he was a haughty officer his men didn’t respect. He got depressed over failure of his early work and started a suicide attempt but didn’t follow through. When Brideshead succeeded he got rich but squandered the reputation and the money. These and lots of other life events rough out a diagram of fear papered over with feckless arrogance.

The Brideshead plot is nearly all flashback from protagonist Charles Ryder arriving during the 1940s war at the site of long-ago friend Sebastian’s family’s opulent country home (Brideshead). Sebastian becomes an alcoholic (“he maintained all the physical habits of self-confidence, but guilt hung about him like stale cigar smoke”) and Ryder succeeds as a painter and falls in love with the Sebastian’s sister Julia although both of them are already married. Secondary characters include Julia and Sebastian’s dad who has left his wife, and Julia’s Canadian husband Rex of whom Julia says:

He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

The book ends with otherwise successful and free-spirited Ryder becoming a Catholic, without as far as I can tell much of a moral struggle.

There is a background of lifestyles of the British rich and famous throughout, and I sense in Evelyn Waugh’s background a bit of the same thing I said about Martin Amis:

“a sort of bad boy combination of being to the manner born but scorning authority… It’s Oh well, I happen to have this damned talent and brains and all this (education) and wealth but it gets in the way of what’s really important and clear: life is the SHITS when all’s said and done.”

… except that for Waugh when all’s said and done you just become a very conservative Roman Catholic which even though everything has fallen apart otherwise entitles you to pie in the sky when you die.

Other readers might see Brideshead with its impressive style and characters differently but I couldn’t get clear of the specter of the author himself.

7.8/9.0