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On its 75th anniversary, what is the enduring appeal of Brideshead Revisited?

Brideshead Revisited channel 4 show - Television Stills
Brideshead Revisited channel 4 show - Television Stills

Brideshead, the name of the great house in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel — and a name so familiar that it heralds “a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds” — is more resonant than those of our own modest abodes. It is a literary home in which the British can find a seat for our emotions.

As the late Christopher Hitchens once wrote: “It comes as a shock to discover that Waugh nearly called Charles Ryder by the surname of Fenwick, and almost gave Cordelia the first name Bridget. Such is the power of a great novel to make us feel that we own it almost as private property, as it were, and must resent any intrusion on our intimacy with it.”

To know Brideshead Revisited is to hold it fast, whether we know it through reading and re-reading, that languorous 1981 television series, or the Audible version read by Jeremy Irons, the nation’s Charles Ryder of choice.

This Thursday, May 28, the book will celebrate its 75th birthday. BBC Radio 4 Extra will be repeating its radio version from tomorrow, starring Ben Miles as Charles, Jamie Bamber as Sebastian, Anne-Marie Duff as Julia, and Toby Jones as Brideshead. Castle Howard will be hosting a Twitter webinar on Thursday to discuss the house’s relationship with Waugh’s novel. While legions of callow youths will doubtless sally forth bearing strawberries, bottles of Château Peyraguey — and teddy bears.

Waugh may have referred to Brideshead as his “magnum opus” in several letters, but he told Graham Greene that he was “appalled” when he read it again in 1950. In his preface to the revised edition of 1959, he explained that he had written it while invalided by a minor injury between December 1943 and June 1944.

“It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the period of soya beans and Basic English — and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful. I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book.”

Needless to say, it is a lavishness that once again brings solace in a period in which we are also beset by disaster, and a privation built out of hoarded baked (rather than soya) beans.

Subsequent criticism has been much occupied with this question of the novel’s status, in an ironically meta fashion for the tale of an upwardly-mobile castle-creeper, who almost — but not quite — gets his hands on the stately pile. Is Brideshead Revisited a great book, demand critics, is it even Waugh’s greatest book? Are we dealing with a work of genius, or some extravagantly puffed-up folly?

The 1981 television series of Brideshead Revisited
The 1981 television series of Brideshead Revisited

John K. Hutchens, who reviewed it for The New York Times in December 1945, was in no doubt, noting: “Brideshead Revisited is Mr Waugh’s finest achievement.” This was prior to publication of the highly-rated Sword of Honour trilogy, however; novelist Patrick McGrath deemed that Brideshead “should be read every year by every serious reader”, while Hitchens referred to it as Waugh’s “masterpiece”.

Detractors denounce it as soppy and snobbish, resisting the fatal English charm that Antony B-B-Blanche so warns Charles against. Despite Brideshead being Penguin’s best-selling Waugh title — a stylish new edition set to enter the Penguin English Library this October — a recent essay by John Self for Penguin exhorts readers to “look beyond Brideshead”. Waugh, argues Self, is “tragically, famous for the wrong book”, his work “overshadowed by the monolith of Brideshead Revisited”, dismissed as “solemn and dreary”. Even Hitchens, a fan, found some moments “a little too… rich”.

Moreover, it may be considered curious that the tale that brought Waugh “an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers” should involve such an exquisite paean to homosexuality, which was both still then illegal and “high in the catalogue of grave sins”. Meanwhile, sundry other sins take up the remainder of the book, hence its (largely forgotten) subtitle: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

So what is the enduring appeal of this novel that has such a grip on the popular consciousness, even among those who — like Hitchens, radical and anti-theist — one might imagine would resist its heady allure?

It haunts us because it is about being haunted; a postlapsarian account of the prelapsarian, and an elegy for not one, but two lost worlds. At Charles’s second encounter with Sebastian, Anthony Blanche famously reads The Waste Land via a megaphone and the narrator of Waugh’s text is not so different to Eliot’s, he too shoring these fragments against his ruins. Three-quarters of a century later, as we too mourn the loss of one world and advent of another — so many of us beset by memory, dreams and nightmares — this feels very right, very now.

A.N. Wilson, who provides an introduction to 2018’s Folio edition, describes the novel as: “lush, colour-splashed, romantic”. “It is Waugh’s Antony and Cleopatra. It is his richest, and most passionate, book: passionate about male love, about the love between men and women, about the centrality of beauty in human life.” This is the big stuff, the very stuff of human existence, even without the narrative obsession with sin. New readers who come to Brideshead via Downton Abbey may find they have bitten off more than they can chew.

As with Hamlet, even those who aren’t great quoters will find they can summon the odd line, say: “I had been there before; I knew all about it”, or: “My mother died in the war. Oh… how very unusual.”

In the same way, to call someone a “Samgrass” or a “Hooper” is to be instantly understood. One friend once referred to another as “a bit of a Charles Ryder” and we all cried: “Oof.” I once slept with a chap because he informed me I was “pure Julia Flyte”. Meanwhile, if I ever want my boyfriend to perform some small task, all I have to say is “Rex…?”, in tribute to the latter’s pre-marital slavishness.

Brideshead, it must be said, is also bloody funny. One thinks of Cordelia’s sacred Vatican monkeys, or the wincingly awful Celia asking whether she should “put her face to bed”, lest her spouse require intercourse.

Personally, it is not Oxford, Venice or Brideshead itself that exerts its siren call, but the interlude on the boat; not “forerunner” Sebastian, but his sister whom I weep over. That nightmarish breakdown at the fountain — as coruscating a scene as ever appeared in Eng Lit. For all the book’s sepia-tintedness, the nostalgia it gives us is of the most lacerating sort, a blade never not among the plovers’ eggs.

Still, in the end, even this pain becomes a pleasure, and part of our reason for revisiting. A.N. Wilson again: “Waugh is one of the rare band — Lermontov, Jane Austen, Nabokov — who made of his novels perfectly crafted objects. Brideshead Revisited, of all his books, is the most beautifully made, the most richly enjoyable. Above all, enjoyable.”

Re-read it and weep – but happily.