Appearance
Brideshead revisited: The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder (The Albatross modern continental library)
This is one of my favorite books of all time and it's frustrating to have to read it in such a poor edition. The typos and all-over formatting is deplorable (That's why the 4 stars as opposed to the 5 stars it should deserve). The material is still wonderful, so much can be forgiven. I question however, how this e-book was created. It does not even list the correct author (Waugh)and the author listed (Wendorf) has not added any commentary to the text. Makes me wonder if this is a pirate copy that slipped by Amazon! Whatever, for 2 bucks it's still one of the 100 greatest books ever written and deserves to be in everyones' collections.
Brideshead revisited: The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder (The Albatross modern continental library)
Great novels may speak to universal human concerns, but they do so by means of particulars, and those particulars interlock in different ways with the experience of each different reader. We come to books by different routes in terms of personal background, literary expectations, or cultural climate; it is only reasonable to acknowledge them. For example, I was initially attracted to the book by its resonance with my own Oxbridge days, the seduction of people from older families or greater wealth, and late adolescent confusion about sexuality and religion. More recently, I come to BRIDESHEAD REVISITED after reading a number of earlier Waugh books, together with those of his fellow convert to Catholicism, Graham Greene; this perspective casts a different light on a book that I knew only from the now-iconic BBC serial of 1981. And more recently still, there is stimulus of the new Miramax movie, a magnificent experience whose significant differences from the book nonetheless help to focus on what Waugh was actually doing. Personal, literary, and cultural: let me address these points in the opposite order. I shall try not to give any outright spoilers, but I am writing for people who already know the general outline of the story.The movie first: splendid acting, fine period detail, and a feast for the eyes -- although Castle Howard in Yorkshire, one of Britain's grandest buildings, is surely at least twice the size of Brideshead. My greatest surprise in reading the book was to discover how many liberties the screenwriters had taken with the dramaturgy of the original. It was not just a matter of removing discursive passages and tightening things up; significant events had been taken out of order and others inserted, with invented dialogue to go with them. In both film and novel, the middle-class narrator Charles Ryder falls under the spell in turn of Lord Sebastian Flyte, his ancestral home Brideshead, and his sister Julia. The movie makes much more of the implied homoeroticism between Charles and Sebastian (which Waugh probably could not have done even if he had wanted to), but it also introduces his awareness of Julia quite early as a counterpoint to this, culminating in an episode in Venice which effectively causes a break with Sebastian. By the time Sebastian and Charles have parted in the book, however, Julia has made only peripheral appearances and has barely entered Charles' radar. Similarly near the end of the movie, the scene where Charles bargains for Julia with her Canadian husband Rex Mottram has no equivalent in the book whatsoever; Waugh simply glides over the transition as though it didn't matter. But then Waugh treats Julia's marriage to Rex as a hole-in-the-corner affair; he is a divorced man whom, as a Catholic, she can marry only in a state of sin. In the movie, by contrast, Rex too is Catholic and a splendid catch; the grand scene of Julia's engagement ball makes a dramatic climax, at which Sebastian disgraces himself by appearing drunk, and Charles is banished from the house.So did Waugh not have the trick of the big dramatic moment? On the contrary, he could manage this perfectly well, as his other novels show, but here seems to aim at something entirely different. In every case, the adjustments in the movie tend towards a more conventional drama, in terms of social tensions, personality struggles, and the cavalcade of events. Much is made, for example, of Charles' lower social status, but there is nothing of this in the book, whose characters are grace itself. Emma Thompson has a virtuoso grande dame role as Lady Marchmain, the mother of Sebastian and Julia, but the character is the book is altogether gentler; she works through persuasion, not by force of will. Things that happen in the movie like a coup de thétre, such as Charles coming together with Julia or Lord Marchmain returning home to die, take days or weeks in the novel. The movie is in the moment but earthbound, while Waugh has another dimension. His rhetoric is not that of a Hollywood actor; he is trying to represent the still small voice of God.BRIDESHEAD REVISITED (1944) is an often funny book, with satires of upper-class twits, sanctimonious hypocrites, and posing aesthetes, but it is rooted nonetheless in a basic sense of civility. Waugh's earlier books, such asPUT OUT MORE FLAGS(1942), were more obviously satirical and not so rooted, but you can see the author struggling to give them moral ballast. This occurs most obviously inA HANDFUL OF DUST(1934) where, in an attempt to resolve the frivolous immoralities of the novel, the author tacks on an ending that belongs to a different world altogether. Here, although the religious themes are introduced as a matter more of biography than belief, they are nonetheless pervasive. Compare Waugh to Graham Greene, who converted to Catholicism four years before him. Greene's fascination with sinful characters who nonetheless find salvation, as inBRIGHTON ROCK(1938) orTHE POWER AND THE GLORY(1940), is an assertive statement of a doctrinal paradox; Waugh is more subtle. Indeed, it would be possible to come away from the movie believing that it was an anti-Catholic tract. And yet in the book, Lord Marchmain, Julia, and especially Sebastian in his later years as movingly described by his younger sister Cordelia, emerge as just such prodigals returned to the fold. Even the agnostic Charles appears at the end to be at least half-way towards conversion. Brilliant though the movie's final scene in the chapel was, the ending of the book goes deeper.So what are those universal themes I mentioned? You don't need to have been at Oxford to respond to such a fine description of the springtime struggle to define one's place in society, one's sexuality, one's talents. You don't need to have lived through a war to lament the passage of time and feel the need to honor the past even when hailing the future. You don't need to come from a noble family to recognize the importance of roots, something essential that comes through no matter what; dysfunctional though the Brideshead family may be, it is no accident that Charles is presented as being virtually without a functioning father at all, deprived of the very roots that make them who they are. And you do not need to be Catholic or even Christian to seek some guiding principle in life, or find a means of living without one.
Brideshead revisited: The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder (The Albatross modern continental library)
Published in 1945, this novel, which Waugh himself sometimes referred to as his "magnum opus," was originally entitled "Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder." The subtitle is important, as it casts light on the themes--the sacred grace and love from God, especially as interpreted by the Catholic church, vs. the secular or profane love as seen in sex and romantic relationships. The tension between these two views of love--and the concept of "sin"--underlie all the action which takes place during the twenty years of the novel and its flashbacks.When the novel opens at the end of World War II, Capt. Charles Ryder and his troops, looking for a billet, have just arrived at Brideshead, the now-dilapidated family castle belonging to Lord Marchmain, a place where Charles Ryder stayed for an extended period just after World War I, the home of his best friend from Oxford, Lord Sebastian Flyte. The story of his relationship with Sebastian, a man who has rejected the Catholicism imposed on him by his devout mother, occupies the first part of the book. Sebastian, an odd person who carries his teddy bear Aloysius everywhere he goes, tries to escape his upbringing and religious obligations through alcohol. Charles feels responsible for Sebastian's welfare, and though there is no mention of any homosexual relationship, Charles does say that it is this relationship which first teaches him about the depths of love.The second part begins when Charles separates from the Flytes and his own family and goes to Paris to study painting. An architectural painter, Charles marries and has a family over the next years. A chance meeting on shipboard with Julia, Sebastian's married sister, brings him back into the circle of the Flyte family with all their religious challenges. Three of the four Flyte children have tried to escape their religious backgrounds, and this part of the novel traces the extent to which they have or have not succeeded in finding peace in the secular world. "No one is ever holy without suffering," he believes.Dealing with religious and secular love, Heaven and Hell, the concepts of sin and judgment, and the guilt and punishments one imposes on oneself, the novel also illustrates the changes in British society after World War II. The role of the aristocracy is less important, the middle class is rising, and in the aftermath of war, all are searching for values. A full novel with characters who actively search for philosophical or religious meaning while they also search for romantic love, Brideshead Revisited is complex and thoughtfully constructed, an intellectual novel filled with personal and family tragedies--and, some would say, their triumphs. Mary Whipple
Brideshead revisited: The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder (The Albatross modern continental library)
A perfect delight. Long did I search for this novel: long did I search for Waugh! When I first picked it up (I call it fate), it was only a matter of moments before I knew in my heart that we were old friends. It has the sensational richness and deepness of European aristocratic life, and an unparalleled portrayal of early century Oxford. Just delicious. I couldn't put it down, and when I did I felt a regular beast, and picked it up again. Everything I love about literature was preparing me for this novel. Read it. Of course Waugh's a staunch Catholic, and that (God love him!) only sharpens his mind for what is vice and folly. But you get goodness and beauty, too.
Brideshead revisited: The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder (The Albatross modern continental library)
This book is not written in accordance with current literary tastes. It is descriptive to the point where it is florid sometimes; the writer's politics and elitism can easily offend(he is thoughtlessly snobbish towards characters such as Hooper); and he is describing a vanished world that can be difficult to understand--the sort of aristocrats he describes do not exist anymore and maybe they shouldn't exist (one could reasonably call them parasites). However, the same things could be said about many of the novels that are most worth reading (think of novels from nineteenth century Russia for example). The sensitive reader will soon realize that Waugh is talking about the human condition in this book and showing the necessity of faith, as all that they have materially cannot satisfy these people. They still have a void that can only be filled by God and God pulls them, no matter how much they try to run away from this fact. These are real human beings who are involved in definite sins such as adultery; homosexuality (though it is unclear whether Sebastian and Charles have a physical relationship, the homoerotic undertones in their relationship are very strong, and there are several other openly homosexual characters);alcoholism runs rampant; the narrator has the sin of pride. However, God has grace to handle all of it, and Waugh brilliantly uses Dante's philosophy of human love (including the sinful love such as the adultery and that with the homoerotic element) leading human beings towards the divine love which it is a mirror of. He will make you uncomfortable and challenge your late twentieth/early twenty-first century ideas of moral relativism as he is very uncompromising about what is right and what is wrong and believes in such unstylish things as 'sin', 'redemption', 'duty' and 'sacrifice'. However, he NEVER preaches. The depiction of Sebastian in his later years is one of the most moving things, I think, in all literature, as he describes the destruction of his beauty and his grace in the alcoholism, shows what a total wreck he has made of his life by worldly standards, and yet lets you feel that he has achieved something else with his pain, which is the salvation of his soul. And so there is hope for Julia, for Charles and for all of the other extremely flawed people in this novel. In a world that seems to be dying (one of the best things about the book is its depiction of the world at war).Maybe some of us could use some of this message in a world in which so many more people, not just the 'aristocrats' but also the 'Hoopers' of the world (at least in Europe and America) have so much financially, and are spiritually so miserable. And don't even realise that our disease is spiritual, or if we do, try to salve it with easy, patched-together counterfeits of religion that can do nothing for us, like people taking pleasant-tasting placebos instead of real medicine.
Brideshead revisited: The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder (The Albatross modern continental library)
'Brideshead Revisited', Evelyn Waugh's finest non-satirical novel, is concerned with the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely-connected characters and the decline of the English aristocracy and their stately homes. The novel is a panegyric and a valediction and expresses a yearning for a lost Aracadia and a loathing for the changing world (see Henry Wallace's 'Century of the Common Man' speech). Although there are many passages of buffonery the themes are romantic (homosexual and heterosexual) and eschatological. The novel is firmly ficticious but many characters (and events) are loosely drawn from the authors life - e.g. Lord Sebastian Flyte is based on Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon, Anthony Blanche is based on Brian Howard and Harold Acton (all contemporaries at Oxford), Rex Mottram is based on Brendan Bracken (a Canadian politician who gave Waugh leave from military duties to write the novel), Mr Samgrass is based on Maurice Bowra, Sebast! ian's teddy bear Aloysius is based on John Betjeman's 'Archie' (although Betjeman carried his around to mock the upper classes), etc. The archtitectural details of Brideshead were supposedly based on Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which Waugh had visited (the 1981 television series was filmed there). The characterization is generally excellent although Lady Julia Flyte has been compared to 'cardboard' and a 'wax mannequin' by two of Waugh's biographers. The novel is set in various luxurious and exotic places including Oxford, Brideshead in Wiltshire, Venice, London, Paris, Morocco, South America, on board a transatlantic liner. 'Brideshead Revisited' should not be taken out of its historical and social context. The novel is written in the baroque style and contains florid passages (see 'The languor of Youth' speech) and many high-flown metaphors. Waugh wrote in this style because of the Basic English written by many of his contemporaries. Because of the bleak period! of writing (1944) the novel is 'infused with a kind of glu! ttony, food and wine, for the splendours of of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language'(see the preface to the revised edition of 1960). In 1944 it would have been impossible to foresee the English aristocracy maintaining their identity to such a degree; the future "cult" of the country house in the United Kingdom would also have appeared inconceivable. I would recommend this novel to all first-time Waugh readers and to people interested in the subject and period (1920s-WW2).